The erosion of a high trust society
By Easton Martin | December 10, 2025
Recently, large retailers have announced that they will be charging customers a fee to return merchandise. The introduction of retail return fees, while often dismissed as a minor operational adjustment, seems indicative of a broader transformation in the cultural and social foundations of American commerce.
The United States historically functioned as a relatively high-trust society, in which businesses extended generous return policies based on the expectation of good-faith behavior from customers. These practices were not merely customer service strategies, but expressions of an underlying social contract built upon shared norms of honesty, restraint, and mutual responsibility.
The increasing prevalence of return fees suggests that this foundation has weakened. Widespread abuse of return policies, including fraudulent returns and habitual exploitation of flexible systems, has altered the cost-benefit calculations of retailers. While economic pressures and logistics are frequently cited as primary causes, these factors alone do not fully explain why trust-based systems have been steadily replaced by defensive, compliance-oriented policies. Cultural cohesion plays a significant role in sustaining high-trust economic relationships, and when that cohesion declines, enforcement mechanisms tend to expand.
A substantial contributing factor to this change is large-scale immigration that occurs without meaningful cultural assimilation. When a society absorbs new populations without transmitting its shared expectations regarding personal responsibility and civic behavior, the informal norms that once governed the population weaken over time. This observation is not rooted in animus toward individuals, but in the sociological reality that stable social systems depend upon widely shared cultural standards.
The growing normality of return fees is therefore best understood not simply as a retail trend, but as a symptom of a deeper cultural shift away from trust-based social organization and toward a more regulated and adversarial economic environment.
