[conspire] (forw) What's going on with Fry's Electronics?

[Nick Moffitt]

On 15Sep2019 11:06pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> There are many retail stores that have a shrinkwrapping machine in the
> back so that merchandise returned as 'defective' can be whipped right
> back out onto the shelf again.  In fairness, this is because, in many
> industries including electronics, a high percentages of customer returns 
> are made in a sincere but totally wrong belief that the product was
> defective.  And _that_, in turn, happens because a depressingly high
> percentage of the buyers don't follow instructions and jump to wrong
> conclusions unsupported by evidence.

Slightly tangential to this, I recently found myself citing Moen's Law of Bicycles to a group, and going into the back story: "You see, in the 1970s Bike Boom..."

Then I looked around and checked myself, because of course I was in a cycling advocacy meeting and the "law" was no longer a metaphor but a literal observation of the "BSO" phenomenon everyone there knew.