On Returning an Air Filter
A Lovely Facet of Modern Life
About a month ago, I bought an Austin Air. We’d bought a recliner which poisoned me for a while, and with a sectional on the way, we didn’t want to take any chances. The air filter and the couch arrived within a day of each other, and I got an annoying tickle in my throat soon after.
For a while, I assumed it was the couch. But my symptoms didn’t match either the ones I’d had with the recliner, or descriptions of common furniture reactions online. We tried a bunch of stuff - quarantining various pillows that had come with the couch, vacuuming it - but what made the biggest difference was, recently, just turning off the filter.
I’m nervous about trusting online health fora; communities that spring up around afflictions tend to have bad epistemology to the point they can become infohazardous. But this person’s experience was a pretty good match for mine.1
I’m not totally sure I’m cured; low-key histamine issues can shade into anxiety/placebo, and when I actively try to focus on my throat it’s maybe still a little weird. But before it was obviously disrupting my day-to-day life, and now it isn’t.
I feel a few big feelings about this - for one, I’m flummoxed by the high-stakes mysteriousness of the human body and its interactions with its environment. But in this post, I want to focus on one feeling in particular. A positive one.
Consumer Norms are Amazing
I’m really, really happy that I was able to return my air filter. It was about $800, which buys a lot of baby stuff. The process was easy, too. Despite not having the original packaging anymore, and not alleging that the filter was definitely broken (I honestly described my unusual reaction as my reason for the return), I expect to get a full refund. They even covered the shipping costs for getting the (large, heavy) object back to them.
Further, I’m grateful and amazed that none of this is surprising. It’s good, certainly; plenty of customer service experiences are bad, and the one I had with Austin Air was excellent. But the basic fact of “you can generally return stuff that doesn’t work for you, and get a full refund” is… really incredible. Less than a hundred years ago, there weren’t even safety standards for food processing. We have come a long way.
My gratitude is even deeper when I try to tease out the causality. Why am I allowed to return products that I decide against keeping, with the full expectation of a refund? Largely because the internet makes it easy to complain about companies, and successful companies benefit from protecting their reputations. But I actually think it’s one step better than that: I don’t think most companies even use some cynical calculus. They process returns because decades of high consumer power has created a norm. Reputable companies will simply let you take a transaction back, with both parties operating in good faith throughout. That’s miraculous.
Sometimes I think about the negative compounding effects of low social trust in some domain. Locks are the obvious example - in a society with almost any bike theft, every biker has to waste hours of their life finagling with bike locks; bike thieves harm not only their victims but, indirectly, all cyclists. Free 30-day return policies are the opposite: the existence of this norm lets consumers try more and riskier products than they might have. My parents bought an electronic keyboard from Costco the other day, and it sounded bad, so they returned it. Now they’ll get one that sounds good. In a world without returns, they would have either been stuck with the sucky one, or too timid to buy a new keyboard at all. And they, like me, didn’t even have to worry! You can just assume that expensive stuff is returnable, if it doesn’t work for you.
One of my core values is trying to notice when something about the world is great. I know I’m harping on it, but modern corporate return policies are one such thing.
To be clear, I don’t think Austin Air did wrong by me at all, or that their products are generally throat-tickle-creating. I, like the author of that Reddit post, seem to have an unusual sensitivity.