History Main / AbuseOfReturnPolicy

* ''Series/ParksAndRecreation'': [[TheDandy Tom Haverford]] reveals this is how maintains his [[TheHedonist extravagant lifestyle]] despite working a low level government job and being in massive debt. He buys expensive and luxurious goods, uses them and then on the last day of the policy, returns them to store pretending he never used them (he is not above using tears and other self-humiliations to shame store personnel into accepting the returns), then uses the money to buy more goods. Several times it backfires on him, with the items either getting broken or lost, and him struggling to come up with the money.
* ''Series/ThatsSoRaven'': The premise of "Point of No Return" is Raven needs a scientific calculator for her classes, so Victor gives her a $100 for it. However, Raven instead spends the money on an expensive dress, planning to wear it to big party that night and then take it back the next day, then use the refund to buy the calculator. However, before she can get to the party Raven drops her lipstick on the dress, forcing her, Chelsea and Eddie to stay up all night trying to get the stain out. Following several other disasters, she almost gets away with it, but the store finds out and refuses to take the dress back, leaving her father forced to pay $200, and him making her work to pay it off.

* The UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} Refund Policy states that you can get a full refund on a game purchase if you have played it for less than two hours. Of course, if your entire game takes less than that to complete, there's absolutely nothing stopping people from refunding it once they are done, essentially playing it for free.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarepants'' episode 'Pickles', the antagonist Bubble Bass demands a refund from Mr. Krabs due to [=SpongeBob's=] improperly making a Krabby Patty by forgetting the pickles.[[note]]Though in reality, he hid the pickles under his tongue.[[/note]] To drive the point home, BB points out a money-back guarantee on the Krusty Krab menu (which is written very tiny). Krabs, being the cheapskate he is, desperately tries to make Bubble Bass reconsider, to no avail.

* ''Film/OceansEight'': Tess Ocean's EstablishingCharacterMoment has her selecting various expensive cosmetics from a fancy department store, then going up to a clerk and saying she wants to return them. When the saleslady asks to see her receipt, Tess becomes huffy and claims that she shouldn't need one since the items are unopened; when the woman insists, Tess angrily declares that she'll just keep them instead. A JumpCut shows her striding down the street carrying ''five'' shopping bags from different stores, suggesting that she's pulled the con in every boutique she passed.

* On a similar note, the Amazon Kindle Store has a policy that ebooks can be fully refunded within one week. After complaints from the Authors Guild about speedy readers abusing the policy to read books for free, Amazon amended it in 2022 so that books can no longer be refunded if over 10% of them are read.

This type of RealLife misbehaviour has resulted in many retailers charging a restocking fee on returned items, especially retailers of high-value goods which tend to be a target for this trope.

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