Ordered energy drinks on Amazon because I couldn't find the flavor at the grocery store anymore (Monster Nitro Cosmic Peach). The estimated arrival day got pushed back twice, and then the status changed to say that the item was late enough that I could claim a refund. I punched the tracking number into the UPS website and it said that a shipping label had been created, but the package was never actually handed over to UPS. My guess is that the seller ran out of stock and decided to do nothing about it and just wait for me to refund, but I guess it's also possible that someone at UPS swiped the package instead of scanning it into their system.
Either way, I did get a refund through Amazon support.
$26 on broken wine glasses from Amazon.
$7k from my 2021 taxes after having my ssn used by a stranger and then the paper forms getting lost in the mail twice.
Ordered a pair of Moondrop Chu IEMs, mostly for the eartips that come with them. Pair was defective, so I contacted the seller and demonstrated that one ear doesn't work. Got a full refund without return, ordered a new pair, and ended up with two sets of those eartips.
I gave away the second pair equipped with generic eartips to a friend who recently broke his earbuds. I also snipped the dead earbud, heatshrunk the wires, and I use the single earbud for when I'm washing the dishes or doing the laundry. Very nice outcome for me!
A game I only bought because someone else wanted to play that together on a private LAN party. That person then announced that they couldn't show up. And since I was terribly uninterested in playing that game on my own and only bought it for just that occasion, I refunded it after that news.
I guess technically a refund? I returned tools I rented from O'Reilly to fix the timing chain on my truck. 250,000 miles and still runs like a champ, just ignore the noisey lifter haha
I've been fixing up an old motorcycle, and the weekend I was finally ready to try starting it I discovered an issue in the electrical system. I discovered this by blowing both of the fuses I had for it. I ordered new fuses from Amazon that would arrive Monday, but then decided Saturday morning that I didn't want to wait, so I replaced the existing fuse holder with a more modern one so I could get fuses at the auto parts store, and returned the older style fuses when they arrived
Mine is a little different! It's a '69 Honda CT90. Used to be my dad's, and about a month ago I brought it back from my Grandpa's and tore it down nearly to the frame to clean and rebuild it
My refund was for a pack of tomatoes, boring! So I'll tell you a funny refund story I heard today. Friends, mostly a bit squiffy (driver aside) were trying to book a hotel at their destination on booking.com. There were rooms available in hotel A. "Check the reviews" said Ms Sober. "Nah, just book it!" said Ms Squiffy.
Booking made, they tried to contact the hotel. No answer. Reviews were AWFUL. "Rats behind the bar" type awful. Fast forward to arrival aaaand the hotel was closed. They moved on to hotel B, where they learned that hotel A was shut because the owner was in jail for repeated violation of food hygiene standards.
So they called booking.com for a refund. "We can't refund you until we've heard from the proprietor." "The proprietor is in PRISON." "Well we'd still like to give a chance to get in touch."
It took them weeks to get their money back. Moral of the story is always try to book directly with the hotel.
I just had a look and apparently it's back in business.
Review from this month: "Refused to stay, checked in 3 rooms & all checked out within 10mins of arrival, the disgusting place is a health hazard, taps not working, mould all over walls, the place needs closing down."
Owner: "Sorry this not true just looking for refunds."
Ordered a shelf, it was never handed off to the courier. Complained, got it redelivered but they sent it to the wrong address. They seem to have refunded me twice... haven't received any money back yet, but the shelf is due to arrive tomorrow so we'll see what happens
Many months ago I got a refund of around $250 on an online course because I changed my mind after my purchase. It was an amazing course but I didn't see myself using the knowledge in the future. Good thing I got a refund in time.
Online grocery order had a like-for-like product substitution, but the substitution was from a producer that uses a slightly different set of ingredients, one of which I have an intolerance of. Sending it back garnered a refund... and might have helped train an algorithm somewhere.
That is, if they have some kind of semi-random procedure to choose which customer gets a substitution, someone else who'd be more likely to accept it might get it instead, and I'll get the product I can eat.
I think those substitutions are picked by the person filling your order. We got a hilarious substitution from Walmart once. My wife ordered a bottle of thyme or oregano or something similar. They were out of stock so the worker went to the garden center and substituted it with a fucking potted plant of thyme or oregano. We both laughed our asses off at their choice but it wasn't what we needed.
The place I use allegedly uses robots to pick the orders, so, in theory anyway, it's a machine making the decisions. Or someone sat in front of one, rather than on the warehouse floor.
Was waiting for my flight out of LAX, so I grabbed a salad from the closest spot. $20, but whatever. Open it up and the ham smelled sour and all the iceberg lettuce was slimy.
I've never asked for a refund on a salad before, but for 20-fucking-dollars it should have been chopped up and prepped that very day. Yuck.
Bought a really nice TV a couple of years ago. About a month later, the manufacturer had a really big price drop. Microcenter has a really nice 60 or 90 day price guarantee so I popped into the local store and got about $800 back.
Hozelock adjustable long spray lance, absolutely unfit for purpose, disposable garbage that broke after 3 months.
Last refund was a nightmare as it was a purchase from Amazon and outside their 30 day window, so initially they did not want to accept the return and directed me to the manufacturer. Hozelock just refused to engage, and directed me back to Amazon, endless loop. After going round this loop I then complaining to Amazon for a solid 10 minutes and they eventually agreed to pay for pick up of the item then refund when it was picked up.
Replaced it with a more expensive Dramm lance that every part is user replaceable with available spare parts, and much less plastic components.
Sewing machine. It was cheap as I am just learning and didn't want to drop heavy change. I actually returned it and bought another one. Both had shit bobbin casings (I think that's what they're called). Literally said, "fuck it," returned it, and youtubed how to sew by hand. Much less frustrating.
Tons of performance issues, bugs and I was generally not satisfied with the game even though I've put probably thousands of hours into the first game, which always ran perfectly on my computer. Believe me, it takes a lot for me to not enjoy a physics-based game and I really wanted to like it.
Last week I bought one of those giant vacuum insulated travel mugs (not a Stanley) from a discount variety store, along with a bunch of other things. After I paid, the cashier asked "do you want the receipt?", I normally say no, but this time for some reason I said yes.
After I left the store, my kids needed to use the restroom, so while they went I sat down on the bench and absently looked through the receipt in my hand.
I immediately noticed I got charged twice for the mug. The cashier must've double scanned it.
I went back to the store, showed a manager my receipt, and they refunded me the difference.
That was technically my last refund, but the last product I actually returned was a set of tws (true-wireless-stereo) IEMs (fancy earbuds). They were a brand new model just released with great reviews, I bought them from Amazon, received them, and used them about a week. During that week I noticed every time they were in my ears, my ear canals got super irritated and my ears felt warm. And whenever I removed them the insides of my ears would be crazy itchy for hours afterwards. It got to a point after a week of use that my ear canals would swell and close up about 15 minutes after I put the earbuds in my ears. Didn't take a rocket surgeon to work out I was allergic to whatever material that earphone was made of. I still had the box and all the packaging, submitted a return to Amazon with the comment "my ears are allergic to those earphones" and they accepted it no problems, I got a full refund.
I bought a power supply for a second hand monitor and found that the 90-degree angle on the plug meant it couldn't actually go into the socket. I took it back to the shop and the owner offered to solder a straight plug onto the adaptor for me - but couldn't find one to use, so he gave me my money back.
I've been playing that actually! It seems pretty good, but also very difficult. It feels like I'm too busy not dying to figure out the objectives most of the time. Also I'm not ab fan of the weapon variety so far, but to be fair I haven't gotten very far with the weapons and abilities.
I bought a collection of DOSBOX-wrapped TSR Gold Box AD&D games from Steam. After spending more time than I recalled it needing to generate a party and then even longer getting my bearings puttering around the civilized part of New Phlan, Pool of Radiance started crashing and truncating item strings (rendering them useless and un-removeable) and dropping like 50,000 gems from a random Kobold encounter.
It was unplayable without, I assume, tracking down sketchy third-party save-game editors. However, since it took me a couple of hours to get out into the first proper dungeon, they tried to say I was past my "reasonable" preview time, which I guess in reality is treated as a two-hour hard cutoff. I ran it through the system a couple of times and got auto-denied, but eventually got through to a chat agent who gave me my eleven dollars back as Steam credit. :-)
A heavy triply steel kadai. Well technically it was a small fucking piece of plastic cup which I had to fight with Amazon to get a refund for that shit.
Amazon sends me open, broken, defective, and/or outright used items all the time these days. So I have a lot of returns, and if I get two in a row, I take a refund instead because their whole inventory of that item is probably too polluted to get a new one. If only there were any other ways to get some things, I'd quit buying from them, but with the lack of small specialty stores, even in cities, it's so hard to find so many things in physical stores anymore, and smaller online stores can't compete, especially for items that need to be tried a lot to find the right size or type.
I bought a pair of Birkenstock dupes on Amazon and they were at least 5 sizes too big. I ended up with a pair of Crocs that are styled like Birks and even look like leather. Crocs are my jam. I'll take the hate.
I believe it was a steam game that didn't work through proton. Valve customer service is amazing! Happy with the trade-off where the flash sales ended to enable them to offer refunds.
Amazon sent a mouse mat that was the wrong box in the first place QcK Heavy instead of QcK, and even worse, inside was a dirty old mouse mat from a different brand entirely. It was annoying to post it back (internationally, they aren't in my country) but they refunded without issue at least.
Shoes. I bought 2 pair of shoes from the same maker in the exact same size. One pair fit, the other both too small (in length) and too big (in width and depth) so no size was gonna work.
Lindsay Olives Ripe Pitted Snack 4 pack. They changed the packaging, which is fine, but the olives taste worse and have strange texture. I already tried Pearls and they didn't pass muster from the get-go.
An office chair. A piece was wrong making the thing unassemblable. Got the money back and bought a more expensive one from a much better shop. Happy about that because the expesive chair is much better than what the cheap one would have been.
It started to randomly shut down. I sent it to Asus for repair 2 times, but they always claimed that they could not find the issue. After realising that Asus was not gonna help me, I sent it back to the seller for a refund, which took 3 Months, a lot of emails and a phonecall to actually get.
In total between the repairs and refund I spent about 6 Months on this issue.
I got some jeans on Amazon, and I've came with some clear goop on them and the opened plastic wraping. It seemed like some kind of machine grease to the touch, but I have no idea. Anyway I got the refund without issue at least.
A Denon soundbar, that had a mysterious HDMI conflict that couldn't be fixed after multiple reparation attempts.
It's good that or most prominent webshop does reparations instead of automatic rebates, however I had to mail it back three times. And the second to last time they returned it saying it wasn't broken.
So when I mailed it up the last time they initially refused to refund, as 'it hadn't been repaired three times yet'.
Luckily they found it impossible to fix the problem, hence I got my refund. I'm happy with my JBL that was 50 Euros cheaper.