Is it ethically wrong to purchase something knowing you are going to return it?

[HylianSwordsman]

The arguments in here saying it would be wrong are all pretty weak, but the only one I saw with any merit is the idea that if this happens often enough, companies will get tired of losing money and remove the return policy, which is absurd. It is offered to help people, true, but all the company would have to do it put some conditions on it. For example, if a company selling air conditioners didn't want to get ripped off by people buying one at the beginning of the summer and returning it at the end, they could just put a time limit on the return. Two weeks should be enough to find out if it was defective for a typical customer, and short enough to make it not worth the hassle for OP. For the graphics card, it's even easier. Just make it so if the package is opened, you can't return it. Items like that usually have a warranty on them, so if the graphics card was defective, a customer that opened the package would just have to contact the company.

If anything, it would be unethical to expect the store to accept the loss of a returned defective product when it should be the manufacturers responsibility. However, if a store wanted to, it could offer to accept returns of opened graphics cards on the grounds that the card was defective, with the idea in mind that it could then claim the warranty guarantee from the manufacturer for themselves. In such a case, OP could still buy and return the product, but he would have to lie to claim it was defective, which at that point would be unethical because of the lying, but probably would still cause minimal harm as the company would only offer such a return policy if the warranty policy didn't require a significant burden of proof of defectiveness to claim the manufacturers guarantee, and the manufacturer would likely only offer such a warranty if they had a plan for products that weren't actually defective, which they often do.