When I used to work as a clerk at a big-box department store, I had the opportunity to work at the customer service desk. Not only was there a lot of customer interaction, but we also had the honor of dealing with customers that were trying to return products that they weren’t satisfied with.

I do remember one particularly bad promotion that we had that resulted in a large number of returns. Basically our flyer advertised that we were selling the best coffee makers ever made. There was also a guarantee for the customers if they were to purchase either a best coffee maker or one of the best coffee pots and be unsatisfied with their purchase that we would give them their money back.

As it turned out, the products we advertised as being the best were actually some of the worst ones on the market. We started getting returns the first day the promotion and within a week we are getting pretty much 95% of all sales back to the store.

The management wasn’t very happy with the results of the sales and we quickly canned the promotion as soon as we could. The reason that they did this was that they had too many returns and were losing money each and every day.