My wife is the 'queen' of returning items. If she's bought something at the store or via some catalog, and comes to find out the item is screwed-up, not the quality expected, or just isn't what she felt was a good deal, then she'll return it. This German character in her.....goes often to extremes. In an average year, I'll bet that she returns at least 20 items. This will range from jeans ordered via on-line which weren't precisely the stated size, to a custon of beer which was two days beyond it's expiration date that she happened to note while in the store parking lot.
It's often shocked me to the extent that German shops and stores go with her (and her associates) in trying to keep harmony with customers and project fine quality sales.
So it came up today via EU judges, that a new opening has been drilled down into the stores, and opens up a Pandora's Box.
Based on the EU judges, if you go out and buy a mattress now....taking it home, and removing the plastic, and the little sticker that says an original product.....you (the customer) still have the right to say 'no'.....it just isn't soft or what I expected, and you can send the mattress (minus the plastic and originality sticker)....back to the store. You get your money back.
You have to remember...that mattress was packed in the plastic to demonstrate to you...public protection and hygiene standards. Companies will tell you....they can't market or sell that product now, with the plastic removed and the sticker gone.
Well....the EU court doesn't care. It was your right as a consumer to say 'no', and return it.
What'll happen now? If you sit and think about it, some PhD guy for these mattress companies, will go and figure up the statistical average (maybe one mattress out of forty) which will be sent back. He'll do the numbers, and figure this is the loss for the company (say 100 of these returns a year, with each mattress around an average of 600 Euro). So the company boss will do the right and smart move of injecting 40 Euro extra onto the cost of each single mattress. So for a four-star mattress which should have been 750 Euro....it'll now turn into 790 Euro, based on the 'EU-fee' that this problem has presented.
Right or wrong? No, it doesn't matter. It's just another regulation that consumers think will be to their advantage, and secretly, the mattress sales guy will laugh because he's not inflating the mattress prices enough to recover his potential losses. Quietly, without saying much of anything.....the EU inflated mattress sales around the market.
The used mattresses sent back? My humble belief is that some guy will offer to back a truck up to the depot every other month, and pick up the new-but-used mattresses for 100 Euro each, and drive off to Poland to sell them at some open market ('practically new')....probably for around 200 Euro, telling folks these were 699 Euro at some German store just a month ago.
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