A customer placed an order for about 80 mint stamps, all in consecutive Scott catalog numbers. I get orders like this all of the time by customers who are building their collection by following a printed album. No big deal.

In his next order, he returned about 30 of the stamps with a note “I don’t need these.” Sigh! OK, if you didn’t need them, why did you order them?

I processed the returns and put the 30 stamps back in my stock. And I gave him the credit on his new order of another 80 stamps.

You guessed it. This second order came back with another load of stamps to be returned because he already had them. I was annoyed the first time. Now I’m unhappy.

Remember the 20-80 rule I just mentioned? This customer fits into that category. I’m going to consume a lot of my time returning many stamps to my stock because this customer isn’t able to determine which stamps he needs. It could be that he doesn’t have a catalog and he’s just ordering sequential Scott numbers and then figuring out what he already has based on the picture on the stamp.

Let me be clear. I have a very liberal return policy. The last thing I want to do is stick a customer with material that they don’t need. That said; I cheerfully accept occasional returns. Everyone makes a mistake and once in a while a customer will return something because they already have a copy. Mistakes happen and returning an item or two is NEVER a problem.

I quickly dropped this customer. I cannot spend all of my time filling an order and then dealing with the large number of returns, all over $20 or so worth of stamps. This isn’t a good use of my time. This customer has to be more precise in ordering. I’d even be willing to tolerate one or two items per order. But not 20+ items.