Zappos Blog

What's striking to me is that the CEO letter mentions Moritz directly.
I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear of this story.

> We asked our board members what they thought of the opportunity. Michael
> Moritz, who represents Sequoia Capital (one of our investors and board
> members), wrote the following: "You now have the opportunity to accelerate
> Zappos' progress and to make the name and the brand and everything associated
> with it an enduring, permanent part of peoples' lives... You are now free to
> let your imagination roam - and to contemplate initiatives and undertakings
> that today, in our more constrained setting, we could not take on."

http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter

> At least two sources who do not hold board seats, but are directly involved
> with Zappos, indicated that Moritz and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh came into
> conflict about the company’s future. Moritz, the sources say, wanted Zappos to
> sell while Hsieh wanted to remain independent.

http://www.pehub.com/45388/zappos-ceo-wanted-to-stay-independent-sequoia-wanted-liquidity—sources/

So many places have great return policies, so it doesn't really matter anymore …. http://www.zappos.com/ is a good example.

Of course it doesn't undermine your point, but it's worth noting that this is not a fundamentally different example to Amazon; Zappos is, at least in a sense, part of the Amazon empire (http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter). To be fair, they did have the same great return policies before the acquisition / merger / whatever.

(Another example of a fantastic return policy, in a rather different domain, is REI's (http://www.rei.com/help/return-policy.html). It used to be even better—lifetime, or maybe just 10 years?—but my understanding is that people would take ridiculous advantage of it.)