I’d imagine someone decides either based on the results of the tests not aligning with expectations (in which case —- cool), or because they’d rather not come out to a customer with a hard ‘no’ on a replacement, and essentially comp it as a courtesy. I wonder if in your case it’s simply been the latter.
Retail is hard. Perhaps less hard for Apple, but I wonder to what extent the retail store employees end up paying for stuff like this.
In a previous life I worked at a Sears. Back when that was a thing.
I was in lawn and garden during springtime. People would come in and buy a fully loaded top of the line lawn tractor. A week later it would be back, covered in mud and grass clippings, clearly having been through hell. Inevitably they were not happy with it. Probably because their pasture was now mowed.
I moved to electronics in the winter. Same story around the Super Bowl but this time big screen TVs.
It was easy to tell. Customers who just went straight to the big ticket item without any questions were obviously not interested in a long term purchase. But we just ate it.
The shitty thing was I got paid commission. Those returns got clawed back in my next paycheck.
I think Apple at least has the decency to pay their retail employees hourly.
Oh, so, fraud.