Devil's advocate. The amount of cable offerings at "The Cable Company" is just absolutely huge. I don't know of any vendor that would have several hundred to thousands of cables in stock when sales are unknown. Unless they have a specific item in stock, they will usually have your cables drop-shipped directly from the manufacturer/supplier. Their restriction on return cable lengths are exactly the same restriction as their "lending library". They can accept returns on these since they are the most popular lengths and can "re-sell" those when other people like them during their "lending library" experience.
Caveat about the Cable Company return policy
I naively thought they had a liberal return policy and bought a few ethernet cables thinking I could return them if they didn't work out for me. Turns out in the fine print of the return policy you can only return interconnect and digital cables that are 1 meter and speaker cables that are 8 feet. Anything else is by their definition "non-standard" and therefore non returnable. That is despite the fact they have numerous lengths you can choose from their drop down menus and the company I bought from (Chord) lists the 5 meter cable I bought as a standard length,
here's the kicker.. you can only return speaker cables that are 8 feet but they sell them by the meter, so it is impossible to return an 8 foot speaker cable because they don't sell any. Lesson learned, read the fine print
here's the kicker.. you can only return speaker cables that are 8 feet but they sell them by the meter, so it is impossible to return an 8 foot speaker cable because they don't sell any. Lesson learned, read the fine print