What Just Happened | Episode Recap

Christine Russo sits down with Juan Hernandez Campos, COO of Happy Returns, a UPS company, to dig into one of retail's most expensive and underappreciated problems: returns. The numbers alone are staggering, and Hernandez Campos does not let you forget it.

$850 billion. That's the scale of merchandise being returned in the US, representing somewhere between 16 and 18% of total sales. Russo and Hernandez Campos get into why, despite that figure, returns still don't have their own line item on most P&Ls, and what it's going to take for the industry to treat this like the structural challenge it actually is.

But the conversation really gets interesting when Hernandez Campos pulls back the curtain on how Happy Returns is using AI to fight return fraud, specifically what he calls "decoy returns," where someone tries to pass off a cheap item for an expensive one. The system now scores every single return, flags suspicious ones, and then puts humans and AI to work side by side to make a call before the retailer ever has to issue a refund. It's a genuinely novel approach, and Hernandez Campos is candid about the internal debate they had over whether to talk about it publicly at all.

Russo pushes on all the right things: why anyone would choose reverse logistics as a business, how Happy Returns thinks about staying ahead of bad actors, and where AI fits into the future of the returns experience for shoppers.

If you work in retail ops, supply chain, or e-commerce, this one is packed with practical insight and a few surprises.