Returns of the ‘Amazombies’: Unwanted packages are a retail nightmare

PLEASANT HILL, Calif. — Outstretched arms laden with packages, they stagger in from the parking lot and wander the aisles, searching for the returns counter.

At Staples, Kohl’s, and the UPS Store, they are known as the “Amazombies” — Amazon customers who show up each day with hundreds of packages to return, turning store associates’ jobs into a retail horror story.

When Amazon signed deals to turn brick-and-mortar retail stores into Amazon drop-off points, it was supposed to be a win-win: Easier returns would mean happier customers and bring more foot traffic to ailing retail locations. But store employees say the Amazombies have become a plague on their working lives, wasting staff time without increasing revenue while creating long lines, fraying tempers, and generating piles of boxes and plastic waste. Some UPS Store and Kohl’s locations have had to allocate additional staff to handle the workload.

Amazon “makes up about one-tenth of our profits, but it takes up about 90 percent of the working day,” said Jeremy Walker, a store associate who worked at a UPS Store location near Dallas that received between 300 and 600 returns per day.

As the de facto human face of Amazon, these retail employees bear the brunt of customer frustration, even though they have no direct line of communication with the company, Walker said. But the reason he ultimately started looking for a new job was to escape the mindless consumption.

“What we’re doing with all these returns, all the plastic,” he said, “it eats at me.”

The allure of free returns has played a big part in getting consumers addicted to online shopping. UPS Stores have long accepted Amazon returns, and Whole Foods began taking them shortly after Amazon acquired it in 2017. Kohl’s was next, in 2018, with Staples following last year. These deals with the same retailers whose businesses were decimated by the rise of e-commerce made returns even easier: In 2023, Americans racked up $247 billion in online returns, according to the National Retail Federation.

Last year, some UPS Store locations started charging about $1 per package they handle. Staples and Kohl’s stores do it free, however, hoping it will lead to more in-store purchases, according to store employees.

But retail workers told The Washington Post that the increased stress, labor hours and cost of materials make that a bad bet, especially during peak periods such as Prime Day — which last week saw millions of Amazon Prime members ordering a record number of products from the site.

At Staples, the burden of turning Amazombies into Staples customers is on the workers, who hand out store coupons, between 15 percent and 20 percent of which they are expected to turn into sales, two Staples workers told The Post.

Joseph Mobley, a former manager of a Staples in Tallahassee, said the company is “counting on that to save the business.” But many shoppers have moved online permanently.

“There’s a reason why they shopped on Amazon and went online to begin with: They’re not brick-and-mortar shoppers,” he said. “And having a hot deal for Charmin toilet paper for $18.99 marked down from $21.99 isn’t going to turn them into a Staples shopper.”

UPS Store spokeswoman Casey Sorrell said the company has a “productive relationship” with Amazon but does not “discuss the details of our business arrangements.” Kohl’s spokeswoman Jen Johnson said the company values its associates “for creating a great experience” and listens to any feedback.

Maria Boschetti, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said its “customers value the convenience of returning products at partner locations, and our partners tell us that operating these programs boosts their businesses.” She added that the company works with each retailer to prepare for the volume of returns and staffing levels. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“We’re the ones who get yelled at.”

While most Amazombies bring one or two items, some shuffle in bearing more than a dozen, and a few bring as many as 50, workers said. The returns have to be scanned, sometimes with an individual code for each item; labeled; bagged; and boxed for pickup. Often, customers are returning an item of clothing they ordered in multiple sizes.

When Staples stores in Florida started taking Amazon returns in August, Mobley said “it was a flood,” with some stores getting as many as 1,000 per week.

The Dallas-area UPS Store had to add two extra employees to deal with Amazon returns, and the Staples store in Tallahassee recently allotted eight paid hours per week for Amazon returns.

During the lunchtime rush on a recent July day at the Kohl’s in Pleasant Hill, customers returning Amazon packages took the escalator to the second floor at a steady clip. The walls of the customer service area were lined with cardboard boxes of Amazon returns that an employee said used to be stored behind the counter but had to be moved so workers wouldn’t trip.

When one customer came in with a shopping cart full of clothes to return, the attendant at the customer service desk called for backup to deal with the growing line. One of those customers, Ashley Sidney, was returning a portable air conditioner. She said she returns Amazon items at Kohl’s all the time and loves the speed of the refunds. “It’s usually in my account before I get to the front door,” she said.

In theory, dropping off an Amazon return at these third-party retailers is easy.

“If you have your QR code ready, and if the scanner is working like it should, and if you have your supplies on hand, it takes five minutes, in a perfect world,” said Mobley, the former Staples store manager in Florida. “But the world ain’t perfect, and people’s phones don’t work, and they don’t know what a QR code is, and they want you to help them. It prolongs the process.”

Often, customers haven’t actually started the return process when they get to the front of the line. Multiple times per day, a customer will come in with improper instructions, not know how to navigate the app or choose the wrong location.

Increasingly, Amazon returns don’t require customers to bring a box, which means shoppers’ unwanted purchases are on full display, offering retail workers a unique window into their e-commerce habits.

A customer once returned nine chairs he was comparing for use in a medical waiting room to a UPS Store location in Virginia, said a store associate who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job. Customers there also have returned a bicycle, a television and a mattress, he said.

At Staples, where Mobley said a single employee is often expected to cover the phone, the cash register and floor sales at the same time, “if someone walks in with an Amazon return, you have to stop and do it.” And if you don’t convert enough of those Amazon returns coupons to sales, “you can get terminated,” said a Georgia-based Staples employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job.

Last year, thousands of anonymous Staples workers signed an online petition asking the company to drop its partnership with Amazon. Staples did not respond to questions about its employment practices. Amazon said its retail partners are responsible for their employees.

Meanwhile, activist investors in Kohl’s, a publicly traded company, have been pressuring executives over the retailer’s relationship with Amazon since 2021, questioning in financial filings whether the returns program is actually profitable.

In addition to helping Amazon physically process customer returns, retail employees are doing customer service for the e-commerce behemoth, workers said.

At the Staples in Georgia, a customer who was told she couldn’t make a return because her item was too large had to be removed from the store after getting into a verbal altercation, the employee there said. At the Virginia UPS Store location, which charges 11 cents to print a return label, the employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity recalled “one gentleman throwing a fit.”

“We’re the ones who get yelled at and put down,” said Walker, the Dallas-area UPS Store employee.

After years of watching the waste incurred by Amazon returns, the UPS Store worker in Virginia said he has started hassling his wife and children about what they order online.

“Every time you order something, someone in a warehouse picked that, the driver had to drive it,” he said. “Multiply that by three or four hundred people in our store alone, all the stores across the country. I try not to think about how many man-hours are wasted.”

For Walker, the “rampant consumerism” evident in the rise of the Amazombies was underscored by returned Adidas shoe boxes printed with the words “Together we can end plastic waste.”

“I probably put 200 or 300 of those things in these huge plastic bags,” he said.