Retailers Face $890B Returns Crisis as 'Weekend Rentals' Exploit Lenient Policies

Somewhere in America, a customer walks into a big-box store with a leaf blower that has never touched a leaf. The machine goes back on the shelf. The customer walks out with a full refund. This scene, once the stuff of sitcom jokes, has become routine enough that retail workers have given it a name: the weekend rental.

The practice is straightforward. Someone buys a pressure washer to clean their deck, uses it once, and returns it. Another customer purchases a generator before hurricane season, keeps it in the garage untouched, and brings it back when the storm passes. A third buys an air conditioning unit to survive a summer heatwave, then returns it when the weather cools. Plants for an open house. Ladders for hanging Christmas lights. Televisions for the Super Bowl. Jewelry for a black-tie event. The list has grown long enough that it no longer reads as aberration—it reads as business model.

At Costco, where members enjoy what the company calls a "risk-free 100% satisfaction guarantee" with no stated expiration date, the returns desk has become something like a seasonal rental counter. Employees who process returns say they can predict the flow by calendar. Snowblowers arrive in March. Generators and chainsaws show up after hurricane season. Air conditioning units stack up after summer heat breaks. One Costco worker, speaking anonymously for fear of losing her job, described watching holiday decorations pile seven feet high after Christmas. She processed a return for $500 worth of meat, cheese, and dip left over from a wedding where fewer guests than expected had shown up. She saw a customer return three necklaces, each worth more than $2,000, that had been worn to formal events. In early November, a member showed up with an animatronic scarecrow, a 10-foot-tall witch, and bags of candy from a haunted tractor ride—all purchased, all returned because there was nowhere to store them at home. The store manager explained that Costco was not in the rental business. The store processed the return anyway.

The scale of this behavior has become impossible to ignore. Returns reached $890 billion in 2024, according to data from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a UPS company. That figure represents 17 percent of all annual retail sales. Ninety-three percent of retailers now identify retail fraud and exploitative return behavior as a major business problem, citing the operational costs of processing returns and the shipping expenses that follow. Vendors who supply products to these retailers absorb much of the damage. One vendor executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his company is required to accept 100 percent of returns with no questions asked, regardless of reason. Return rates on some products run as high as 20 percent or higher. When he worked for a lawnmower company selling to Costco, machines would fly off shelves in spring and return in October—sometimes not even the same brand that had gone out. "People would go buy a new mower, put their old mower in the box and return it," he said. "That behavior is not the norm. But it's not the exception either."

Retailers have begun to push back. Home Depot, sometimes called "Rent a Depot" by employees tired of processing abuse, recently imposed a 7-day return window on pressure washers, dehumidifiers, window and portable air conditioners, and generators. The company framed the change as a way to keep inventory available for customers affected by natural disasters. Store employees say the policy has worked—customers who once returned air conditioning units within two or three weeks now think twice. But the restriction has created a new problem. Josh Powell, a 31-year-old organ transplant coordinator from Arkansas, bought a pressure washer online from Home Depot to clean his new house. It arrived broken, belching black smoke. He drove to the store, got his refund, and bought another one—all before the 7-day policy took effect. Now he worries what happens if his next purchase fails outside that window. Manufacturers, he says, make it hard to return defective goods directly. Will he be stuck with a $500 lemon? "I don't know what the answer is," Powell said.

That uncertainty sits at the heart of the problem retailers now face. The lenient return policies that once differentiated stores and drove sales have metastasized into something neither retailers nor their customers can fully control. Costco's unlimited guarantee, Amazon's customer-centric approach, the legacy of "the customer is always right"—these principles were designed to build loyalty and remove friction from shopping. Instead, they have created an expectation so elastic that it now stretches to cover uses the policies were never meant to accommodate. As retailers tighten the rules, they risk discouraging legitimate purchases from customers who reasonably expect to be able to return broken goods. The industry is caught between two bad options: keep the monster they created, or risk alienating the customers who feed it.