What happens to all the returned vinyl to Amazon?

Melt down and repurpose into marital aids?

 

They really have no way to tell if the food has been tampered with, so they can't risk giving it to anyone. Sad state of the world we live in....

 

They send it straight to a 'professional' reviewer who likes everything and all. Don't even bother with new packaging

 

List price for new vinyl in 1979 was $8.98. Today, you'd need $32.43 to buy the same thing. Considering most regular vinyl releases are $18-23 and specialty audiophile vinyl like MoFi is $35, and regularly discounted 10-20%, I think that's a steal. It's amazing the prices are this low, considering vinyl is absolutely not the household product it was in 1979. We should consider ourselves very lucky we're paying such prices.

$30 SACDs, on the other hand, there's a tangent I could go on...

 

As far as I can tell, Bullmoose(at least the Waterville, Maine store) sells the returns at a discount as used. They don't reseal them, just add them back into inventory as used. A record I returned showed up the next day in the used bin, I could tell by the exact defects as what I returned. I have some issue with this practice, as used doesn't mean defective.

 

A lot of them have ended up at my house! This is why I very rarely buy new vinyl anymore, And nearly 100% of them have come from the same online vendor.

 

They excelled themselves today by sending an album in a plastic bag

 

They're discarded and written off … just like the grocery stores do with expired meat and produce. The reason retail doesn't do this is they don't sell enough new vinyl to warrant a write off … Amazon another story. This is my best guess.

 

Melted down and made into CDs....

 

I think they sell them on to non anal-retentive buyers.

 

this

 

Two things can happen. Amazon is in the business of making money through selling items that people want. They most probably send it back to the distributor they got it from( a one-stop in Shepherdsville, KY) or they buy it at such a discounted rate that they must accept and internalize all returns. They could also shrinkwrap it and re-sell it, hoping that the next customer will accept it. They used to do this at Tower Records. The employees were allowed to pick out any ablum that they wanted to play in the store. After it was done playing, it was placed in a box with other albums and then taken to the back room and re-shrinkwrapped, putting it out in the bins of new albums.

 

Amazon also bundles and sells palettes of returns. I don't know how often LPs wind up in those lots, but on YouTube there are a lot of videos from eBay sellers, retail arbitrate folks, and other pickers/sellers/resellers where they chronicle taking delivery on large lots of Amazon returns that they bid on somewhere.

 

Just like eBay wants me to do! Except instead of buying at a discount rate I'm expected to sell it there at a discount, instead. I guess I'm just like Amazon.

 

Haven't read the entire thread, but I'm pretty sure at least some of them do wind up in Warehouse Deals.

I picked up a couple of reduced price Miles Davis MFSLs that way. One of them I returned again, one I kept. Personally I can handle a bit of damage to the sleeve to save $10-$15 on an expensive lp, as long as the reason for the price reduction is cosmetic. E.g., I think my copy of the In A Silent Way MFSL has the label off center a bit, although the record itself is not pressed off center. And the sleeve has an extra sticker.

I presume, but do not have any evidence, that Amazon takes more time to check and resell pricier lps. I returned two consecutive copies of the 75th Anniversary edition of Joe Henderson Mode For Joe on Blue Note. Both were really warped and pressed somewhat off center. The price was under $10. I have a hard time believing that Amazon would try to resell those. As an aside, those lps were just more evidence of the lame job Blue Note is doing with their incredible back catalog, but that's a topic for another thread..

 

If you want a REAL warehouse deal, contact Bill Buster at Eric Records. He took over a record distributor warehouse years ago in San Leandro, CA. He doesn't have time to deal with it, concentrating most of his time on his own Eric label releases and other CD compilations.

 

IIRC, the big difference is that with book returns, the cover is torn off, and possibly sent to the publisher as proof that the book wasn’t sold.
However, anyone who wanted just to read the pages would be fortunate to get a copy of the discard before it’s trashed.
Years ago, in the bookstore I worked at, I saw overstock stacks of Harlequin romance paperbacks ready to be trashed, along with former Best Selling novels.

Edited for subsequent post:

 

I totally forgot about Warehouse Deals, and I am sure you're correct - a good number of their returned items with no or minimal damage (or at least theoretically with no or minimal damage) must end up in the Warehouse Deals section.

As to how Amazon determines which returned items to resell in WD, which ones to shunt to 3rd party auctioneers and lot-bidders, and which ones to trash, I'm sure there's some kind of machine-learning algorithm running and tweaking itself 24/7 somewhere in Amazon's computer network.

 

lol

 

Question: I have to return an album to amazon (warp) - I only have their cardboard skinny box it came in ( not the outer one it was shipped in) - should I use that box or spring for an outer box?

What do most folks do?

 

Dah. You just buy another record and use that box. Idiot!

 

I always ship returns in the small cardboard box. A good number of records are shipped from Amazon in just that box anyway, so I figure it should be good enough for sending one back to them.

Occasionally I'll get a record from them that's inside a larger box with padding and the smaller inner box isn't completely sealed. I always save one or two of those unsealed boxes for returns.

 

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. But I have a new box coming.

Thanks!

 

I ship them back to Amazon in the dedicated record boxes that they were shipped to me in. Those specialized boxes were designed for mailing records. Amazon is providing the return shipping labels and postage, so, they also assume the risk of further damage. Sometimes, when you buy multiple records at a time, Amazon puts each in one of those boxes and then puts them all in one larger shipping box. One thing I have also been doing lately is to put stickers on the records themselves, writing on them what and where the flaw is. That way, if Amazon re-sells them, whoever receives them knows they are getting junk.

 

They're probably the one company in the whole world that can send them back to their distributors and get credit for them.