A Texas shopper discovered her latest bargain find wasn’t exactly what the packaging promised. Nitza Peña, a realtor, recorded the moment on TikTok when she opened a box of Gucci Guilty cologne she had just bought at Ross and found a travel-size bottle of Colgate mouthwash inside, according to BroBible. “I just bought this, just opened this,” Peña said to the camera before revealing the small bottle.
Her frustration was clear once the bottle came into view. “What the h— is this, Ross?” Peña asked. She later took the box back to the store, and Ross accepted the return, she wrote in the video’s caption, adding that she had been scared the store would refuse it.
The retailer lets customers return unused, unworn, and unaltered merchandise within 30 days with the original receipt, and refunds those purchases to the original form of payment. Shoppers without a receipt are offered store credit instead. The website states that all mattress sales are final, but it includes no explicit policy on fragrances.
Ross has no written rule on fragrance returns
Peña did not say whether employees offered any explanation when she brought the box back. Commenters on her video were split on the policy, with one writing that Ross “will take back anything,” while another said their Ross location had stopped accepting fragrance returns because of cases like this. The video joins other viral packaging complaints, including a shopper who counted the noodles in her soupy Stouffer’s mac and cheese.
Online sellers have described similar problems with return fraud, where buyers swap out a product and send back something else. One Reddit user wrote that people have been buying items, swapping them, and returning “random junk” while claiming it is legitimate. An Amazon seller in another thread wrote that their return rate had spiked this year despite selling the same items for years.
Ross has not publicly addressed the video, and BroBible said it had reached out to the company for comment.
Published: Sep 30, 2026 06:15 pm