Yup. I've personally known people who, shamelessly, would get a Keurig from Costco, drink all the sample pods, and then exchange for a new one, repeatedly.
Ringing up expensive grocery items as cheap SKU at Whole Foods self checkout...
Going on shopping sprees and then calling the credit card company to report it as fraud...
Buying a fancy dress to wear for a few nights out and then returning it...
All things people close to me have done, or continue to do on a regular basis
Talking about a relatively "privileged" class of people here- multiple homes, multiple cars, kids in private school- not struggling single moms working double shifts to put food on the table.
You've always had some proportion of con artists/grifters of course but anecdotally it does seem that there is a higher proportion of people in the US who will, if not flagrantly steal, will do things like this especially against corporations that they mentally categorize as being evil.
Society can handle a small percentage of grifters, they've always been there and always will be. The change is that enshittification is mainstream in the corporate world and feels indistinguishable from being scammed. People begin to feel immersed in it and stop seeing the world as mostly honest and instead as mostly scams. Then good faith policies like these return policies get burned by way more people who lost trust in the system. Then we lose those too.
I sort of hate the "enshitification" term that gets thrown around way too lazily. But, for a variety of reasons, people are tending to deal with larger corporations for the most part and--hey--if I get some money on the side because of a mistake? Whatever. In a way I wouldn't have at some local store.
