WHAT THE DATA SAY: 49% admit to abusing retailers’ return policies

By: Ray Day

CONTACT:

Ray Day
ray.day@stagwellglobal.com 

We wanted to share our latest consumer and business insights, based on research from Stagwell. Among the highlights of our weekly consumer sentiment tracking:

BREAKING THE RETURN RULES

U.S. and UK consumers are finding ways to take advantage of retailers that have lenient return policies, according to our Harris Poll survey with Forter.

• 68% of U.S. and UK consumers believe retailers make it easy to abuse flexible return policies.
• 49% admit to abusing retailers’ policies in the last 12 months.
• 29% are turning to policy abuse to avoid paying full price.
• 30% say they exploit flexible return policies most for clothing and expensive items they could not otherwise afford (46% for younger consumers).
• 63% say they rely on retailers’ promotions and free perks more now than in the past.
• 16% say they have stopped shopping with a retailer because they made their return policy stricter.

BUSINESS LEADERS SOUND THE ALARM

US. business leaders’ concerns are growing about America’s global competitiveness and their own companies’ performance, based on our Harris Poll research with the Leadership Now Project.

• 84% of senior business leaders express concern over the current political and legal environment’s impact on their business.
• 45% say recent executive orders and policies have negatively affected their business’s competitiveness, while 33% report a positive impact.
• Business leaders feel more comfortable expressing their views about government policy within their company (83%) or industry (78%) than publicly (75%).
• Among business leaders who feel uncomfortable expressing their views on government policy, 51% worry about reputational risk to their company or themselves (38%).
• Business leaders are split on whether the current business climate under the Trump administration is better (39%) or worse (37%) than they expected.

THIRD OF CONSUMERS ‘JUST GETTING BY’ FINANCIALLY

With economic concerns growing, half of Americans feel that, no matter how hard they try to move ahead financially, something always comes up to set them back, based on our Harris Poll survey with the Wells Fargo Foundation.

• 48% feel like they are constantly treading water financially and that any unexpected expense could pull them under.
• 33% report they are just getting by financially.
• 63% worry that partisanship and volatility in the U.S. government will negatively affect their personal finances in the coming year.
• 57% say current uncertainty in the U.S. economy makes it impossible to achieve their long-term financial goals.

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