Isn't it strange how there seems to have been an explosion of refurbished GPS devices on the market, in just about every online retailer that you can find? It is really no big surprise, considering the popularity of the hand held refurbished devices, and especially the automotive GPS devices.

So why are there literally thousands, if not 10's of thousands of refurbished GPS out on the market right now? There are actually a lot of different reasons why a unit is going to marked as refurbished by a manufacturer or retailer. Some refurbished GPS are still in their pristine, pre-production condition and haven't even left their own packaging. Take a look at these reasons why any product could labeled as "refurbished":

1. The person who originally wanted the product brought it back to the store, this generally indicates that the original owner of the product took advantage of the store's return policy for one reason or another. In some circumstances the reason behind this return has nothing to do with the functionality or quality of the product; buyers remorse sets in and they decide they need to return the product.

2. The manufacturer created too many of the specific model and needs to get ride of some of their inventory to make room for more. Here a store could simply mark down the product since it was opened and put it back out for customers to purchase, or ship the GPS back to TomTom, Garmin, or Magellan; when the product is sent back to the manufacturer, a business decision needs to be made about how to best handle the new inventory, this sometimes has the outcome of the device getting labeled "refurbished", and then distribute the devices out again at greatly reduced prices. In some cases these "refurbed" products will have never been opened, meaning that the discount is for no reason at all.

3. The product was a "demonstration" or "display model". When this is the case, the product eventually gets sent back to the manufacturer; the factory then inspects the product, makes any necessary changes, and ships it back out under the refurbished label.

4. The product was opened. When this is the case, there is nothing wrong with the product, other than it needs to be sent back to the manufacturer to be repackaged, in which case, oddly enough, it is then labeled as "refurbished".

5. Shipping damage. Sometime boxes get crushed or dropped by shipping personnel, if the damage is major or minor, components or just cosmetic, the unit is shipped back and labeled refurbished.

6. The last reason why a GPS might be labeled in this way is that it didn't work as promised. This is can be a rare scenario. The problems could be cosmetic, like a scratch on the display, or they could be mechanical, like a broken part, and anything that was broken or defective is replaced with brand new parts; once the repair is done the GPS is as good as new, and some might say it is now actually less likely to become defective than the non refurbished products sitting on the shelves of the retail stores; this is due to the fact that refurbished products under go very extensive testing.

Refurbished GPS units represent a value to consumers that they should take advantage of. There may still be some bad apples in the barrell, but probably not more than if they were all "new" devices.