I am part owner of a small retail business (bridal, pageant, formal wear) NONE of our manufacturers/wholesalers pay for shipping. In this day and age of minimal profit margins the cost of shipping a single garment could be 40% of the profit for the wholesaler on a given garment, and can exceed 15% of the retail price of the garment. In case you haven't noticed shipping items has gotten expensive! Our average per package is around $15 now.

You are "considering" buying a single jacket...the manufacturer sells tens of thousands of them, they could care less about that single sale. And in many cases does not accept returns unless it is a defective product.

We special order items all the time. Depending on the customer; are they are good customer, repeat customer, PITA customer, etc, is the item something we might be able to sell to someone else? Based on those criteria we may special order something and not require a non refundable deposit. If we ordered everything everybody thought they wanted and then didn't take we would have a store full of odd merchandise that we would have to discount to get rid of, causing us to lose money and no longer be there for our customers.

I have no idea how the Amex thing works, we no longer accept their cards in our store.

Aaron