Return Policy

This weekend, I learned two important and correlated lessons: Our American culture is to blame for the economic mess (and success), and a 3-year old’s job is to remember whatever you promise them (intently or not).

Let me elaborate on the latter lesson first. During a heavy snowstorm last January, my 3-year son was riding his tricycle in our unfinished basement when he asked me to get him a “real bikey” – you know the one with training wheels. Assuming that kids have a short attention span, I learned to deflect my answers and told him that I will get him one when the snow melts. 3-year olds usually forget what they were doing 10 minutes ago. But sure enough, two months later, we’re outside chalking drawings on the driveway when my son’s already large eyes got even larger that I could swear I saw a big light bulb hover over his head and with a loud squeaky voice he proclaimed: “Daddy, the snow melted, let’s go get a real blue bikey from Target!” Not only he still remembered, but he already formulated a very specific color, shape and location. I pretended to be the tough dad by not responding to his request and by showing him that I was still the boss… and an hour later, we were picking up a new blue bikey from Target. After spending an hour putting it together, that bikey was (according to my son) too small. So we returned it and got him a nice Spiderman bikey, which ended up being too big (I have to agree here, because he could barely peddle and he ended up falling and scratching himself and the bike). So we returned that one too and I will be getting him what he calls a “medium bikey”.

So how is this story related to the first point I am making about blaming our American culture for the economic mess. Well when I was a kid, my dad got us a bike (cool red chopper). It was a teenager’s bike, weighed a ton and I was just eight. I pretended that it was a perfect fit and never told anybody when I crashed from what felt like a three-story bike. Why? Because I knew my dad could not return the bike and I did not want to lose the bike either.

My parents still have that mentality. When they visit from Lebanon, they spend hours making a purchase decision and ensuring it is a great fit to their needs. That’s when I realized how our American culture changed since return policies got easy. In a way, this helped our economy by eliminating wasted time and frustration, but it also created a culture of no commitment. People will keep assuming that their mistakes will be bailed out and that there are no real downsides to breaking a commitment. In the past twenty years, we have learned that it was OK to try things out and if we did not like them, we could just return them, no questions asked. Our culture’s return policy got really easy where we thought we could try a nice car, a large mortgage or even a marriage, with a loose return policy mentality. The neck-deep economic mess we’re in could not be a one-time gig. This will be a recurring event as long as the root-cause remains.