I haven't read this entire thread but I thought I would share a couple of things, the first being half serious:
- I am honestly not sure anyone can expect perfection from manufacturing plants that pay what is it, a dollar a day to people who work untold hours to get a product out by the millions. Maybe perfection is less on their mind than it is on yours.
- I am a retired retail manager. Like it or not, more often than not any and every time someone makes a return on an item, we would lose money. We had habitual returners by the boatload. Also, MANY times the staff would take something off the shelf for the customer to inspect before being handed the money only to be told "ok this looks good now please get me another one." The customer would be asked why and the response was "well this one now has been opened." --- True story and very common. I manged a camera store..for many years. No it is not true that a camera usually does not have any kind of dust in it. More often than not, a camera and/or a lens WILL indeed have dust inside
- There were customers who routinely purchased an item, returned it and purchased it then again online. They even told us they were doing that...to save the tax. Very often, people would buy from us to try it out and if they liked it, returned it and bought it from an out of state retailer or Amazon...to save the tax. Some would do this with everything they purchased from us.
- So at some point the retailer has to say, enough is enough. I had more than once quietly and calmly taken customers aside and told them plain as day that we just could not afford to lose money anymore from them. I then told them that there would be a fee for returns from them starting with their next purchase. Even then I still had some same customers STILL trying to do the same thing and getting royally pissed off when we charged the restock fee. Well, I am sorry but believe it or not, the markup on a lot of items (and yes we sold a lot of Apple products too) is a lot less than the consumer thinks. A typical camera is marked up only maybe 5 to 10% and if we have to take it back and resell it, we cannot sell it as a new item. We would sell them as open boxes at a discount. To get any kind of profit on such an item, is almost impossible.
- I have a LITTLE bit of a hunch that in the case of these 16 iphones...maybe, just maybe these phones were returns from the first batches of Xs phones that had issues from the start....I don't know for sure. But this would certainly explain things like bad packaging or dust. Should they have been packaged back as new? In my opinion, certainly not. But I don't know what this is like in other countries. Here we used to do what we thought was right...package them as open boxes at a discount.
- Having said all this, I can understand the frustration but I have to say that at some point anyone needs to realize that the retailer is getting hurt by a customer like this. I know it's not your fault, but here in the USA at least, some stores, many of them major retailers, have even flagged customers who habitually return items and actually black listed them. Bottom line is, if the retailer isn't satisfying you, then maybe that is telling you that this is not the retailer for you and you should go elsewhere. Sorry to put it this way as I understand the issue, but I am talking here as a former retail manager. Your interests are paramount to me, but my own have to be considered as well. It is not the retailer's fault when something from the manufacturer is defective or improperly packaged. Maybe after so many exchanges, at some point it became time to take it up with the manufacturer. I don't know if the Apple stores in your country are privately owned or owned by Apple. But this approach is certainly worth considering especially since Apple itself can make sure that you get a proper phone as opposed to the store that receives them already packaged doing so. Have you thought about that?
For what it's worth, I have tried both an Xr and an Xs in the past two weeks. I returned them both but not for any of the reasons you stated. They both exhibited poor performance. Packaging, look, feel, buttons, everything looked perfect. And I am pretty picky too.