Five thought experiments to fix your returns before next peak

The past few weeks I’ve been talking to retailers and ecommerce teams nonstop.
Everyone’s in peak mode. Everyone’s understaffed. Everyone’s tired.

You know it’s bad when even the CEO jumps into customer service.
When customer service staff are buried under claims they can’t get through fast enough.
When warehouse staff are standing in front of mountains of incoming returns, many of them blind, with no idea what should be prioritized first.

And the proformas… still handled manually, one by one, every single week.

And I’ve seen the customer side too.
I did my own Black Friday shopping – and some of the return and claim flows honestly shocked me.

No instructions.
Print-your-own-label (from what printer??).
Return first, hope for the best later.

I stood there thinking:
Will I even get my money back?
Will this end up in the right place?
Why does this feel like sending a package into the void?

And then the waiting.
Ten days for a refund – on an order of 8,000 SEK.
Was I nervous? Absolutely.

Every conversation with retailers this season ends in the same place:

Returns and claims don’t just “add pressure” during peak.
They take over the entire company.

Customer service is overloaded.
Warehouse teams burn out.
Margins evaporate.
And customers are left completely in the dark – exactly like I felt with my own order.

Everyone is focused on surviving the next hour, not improving the next year.

And then it hit me:

Retail doesn’t need another glossy “Post-Purchase Trends 2026” report.
Teams need a way to pause the chaos long enough to actually think.

Whenever I’m helping retailers rethink their post-purchase operations, the biggest breakthroughs never come from bigger teams, more tools, or more meetings.

They come from thought experiments – simple, hypothetical constraints that force a shift in perspective.

They help teams see what’s hiding underneath the daily avalanche of returns, claims, refunds, emails, and exceptions.

So in this post, I’m sharing 5 thought experiments I’ve been using with retailers this peak season – prompts that cut through the noise and reveal what actually needs to change going into 2026.

Let’s dive in.

Thought Experiment 1: No new headcount

The prompt
Imagine you’re not allowed to hire a single extra person in 2026.
Not in customer service.
Not in warehouse.
Not in the back office.

But your return volume goes up.
Your cross-border markets grow.
Your claims keep increasing.

What breaks first?

Why this matters
Most retailers still scale returns with people, not process.
But 2026 won’t allow it. Margins won’t allow it.
And your team definitely won’t survive another peak like this one.

The constraint forces a harder question:
If we can’t add people, what has to change in the workflow itself?

Consider this…

• Which parts of customer service’s job could disappear tomorrow if the system made decisions automatically?
• What would need to happen for refunds to go out without manual checking?
• How many warehouse decisions today rely on “tribal knowledge” instead of rules, data, or routing logic?
• If 70–80% of questions from customers are repetitive, what would it take to eliminate them at the source?

Thought Experiment 2 — No blind returns allowed

The prompt
Imagine you’re not allowed to receive a single blind return in 2026.
Every return needs to be pre-registered, documented, and routed before it even reaches your warehouse.

How much chaos would disappear instantly?

Why this matters
Blind returns are one of retail’s quiet killers:
Wrong destination.
Missing data.
Products sitting for days because no one knows what they are.
Warehouses drowning in manual sorting while customer service is blamed for delays.

Eliminate blind returns → you eliminate half the noise.

Consider this…

• If every return had clear routing before shipping, how much warehouse time would you get back?
• How many refunds are late simply because the warehouse doesn’t know what they’re looking at?
• What rules do you think you have today, but no system is actually enforcing?
• How much would your lead times shrink if “unknown packages” no longer existed?

Thought Experiment 3: Refunds must happen instantly

The prompt
Imagine your leadership tells you:
“In 2026, refunds must happen instantly at drop-off for 80% of customers.”

No exceptions.
No manual checking.
No waiting for the product to physically arrive.

What would need to be true?

Why this matters
This is what customers already expect.
It’s what payment providers are designing around.
And it’s what competitors will adopt sooner than people think.

Instant refunding isn’t a “nice to have.”
It’s a loyalty driver.
A conversion driver.
And a pressure release for customer service.

Consider this…

• What events in your system today already prove an item is on its way back?
• Which return types require manual review, and could be automated with better rules?
• How much customer anxiety disappears if they get their money before they have time to wonder where it went?
• What would your Trustpilot score look like if customers didn’t have to chase refunds for 10+ days?

Thought Experiment 4: No product is allowed to be scrapped

The prompt
Imagine you’re not allowed to scrap a single product in 2026.
Every item must go to repair, second-hand, outlet, supplier return, or another responsible route.

Nothing is allowed to go to waste.

Now what breaks?

Why this matters
This is exactly where legislation is heading.
Repair will be mandatory.
Circular flows will be expected.
And products will need “second lives” built into the operations stack — not added as an afterthought.

And the systems that retailers use today?
Most can’t handle even the first life properly.

Consider this…

• How do you decide today if something should be repaired vs. resold vs. returned to supplier?
• What data do teams need to make that call — and who has access?
• How many products are scrapped simply because the logic for handling them doesn’t exist?
• If second-hand grows faster than first-hand (which it is), what capabilities do you need in place?

Thought Experiment 5: What if you only knew what you know today?

The prompt
Imagine you had to run your entire 2026 returns and claims strategy based only on the data you have access to right now.
No new dashboards.
No deeper insight.
Just what your teams can actually see today.

How confident would you feel?

Why this matters
The biggest issue I see in retail isn’t high return rates – it’s that most teams have almost no visibility into what returns really cost.

They don’t know:

• which products are profitable after returns
• which customers become unprofitable once claims and refunds are included
• how much margin disappears in manual handling
• or how much net revenue is wiped out after returns

So decisions get made on gut feeling instead of data.

This experiment forces a simple question:
If we only had today’s visibility i could we make good decisions?

Consider this…

• Which 1–2 metrics do you actually trust today?
• What key decisions are based on assumptions rather than facts?
• Which products look profitable until you factor in return costs?
• If you could see real net revenue after returns, what would change overnight?

Because most retailers don’t have a returns problem.
They have a visibility problem.

————————————–

If there’s one thing this peak season made clear, it’s this:

Retail teams aren’t the problem — the systems are.
They weren’t built for today’s volumes, complexity, or customer expectations.

These thought experiments aren’t about predicting the future.
They’re about finally seeing the present: the manual steps, the blind spots, the margin leaks everyone has learned to tolerate.

And once you see the real problems, the path forward becomes obvious:

Automate the work that drains your team.
Route products based on data, not guesswork.
Give customers clarity instead of anxiety.
Make profitability visible.

Retail doesn’t need bigger teams — it needs better infrastructure.
And the retailers who start fixing this now will be the ones ahead of the chaos in 2026, not swallowed by it.