In article , Theo
wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:
With many cheap items it often saves the vendor money to simply write
it off, when the mistake is theirs.

Bulk postage from say China is obviously very cheap. The cost of
returning an individual item very likely to exceed the retail price -
let alone the out of pocket cost to them.

I'd guess that's what's happening here. They could just refund if you
complained, but then that encourages people to complain in the hope of
getting a free item. So they ask you to 'return' it, and check the
tracking says something was posted. They know that few people will
actually return, because of the postage costs for cheap items.

THEY paid for the postage on the ebay return label.


They don't actually care what happens to the item after that. Possibly
the address was once valid - when this started the addresses were often
Chinese restaurants, nowadays they're more likely to be bonded warehouses
near Heathrow. But now they're effectively outsourcing the landfilling
of their trash products to the postal system, so they don't care what the
address is.

Theo

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England
"I'd rather die of exhaustion than die of boredom" Thomas Carlyle