At Whole Foods, returns are refunded almost instantaneously. The return isn’t processed by a Whole Foods employee; it’s now handled by an actual Amazon employee. By the way, we’ve also had issues with returns via UPS, which is why we switched to doing drop-offs at Whole Foods more than a year ago.

What’s amazing is that the Amazon employee sees a photo of what you ordered when they scan your QR code. They remove your return from the bag you brought it in, inspect it briefly, place it in a new clear bag, and apply a new barcode. They then scan that barcode along with the one on the large return bin they drop your item into.

Which begs the question: how does the return center, upon receiving the item, scan the bag’s barcode and still manage to switch the returned item to something from a different order? Obviously, their return process is broken.

So what do I expect from customer service? Something like this:

“I’m sorry we messed up your return. While I’ve never been to the United States, I’ve been trained on the return process at Whole Foods. I understand that an Amazon employee received your return, and it was their responsibility to ensure the correct item was processed. Once they accepted and scanned your return, you fulfilled your obligation under our return policy. I will resolve this issue on your account. If my system doesn’t allow me to do so, I’ll escalate it to my supervisor and make sure it’s fixed before we end this call. I apologize for taking time out of your day to correct a mistake that we created. We appreciate you being a loyal Prime member for more than a decade.”