Amazon is fabulous, but that sort of real-time return policy workflow is for relatively low-mass & low-expense items from high-volume retailers.
Try returning custom car parts or, really, anything close to $1k USD which essentially mandates shipping insurance.
That said, I love-love the instant UPS-label "pick-up at your office or home" return workflow for the majority of stuff I buy from them.
The item is here in two days (Primed) and if I need the rare return, it's, at most, about 5 minutes worth of my time & attention. It's such a total win over the typical retail process for non-bespoke items.
A case isn't there primarily to protect the screen. It's there to absorb shock, protect against nicks and scuffs on the non-glass regions, and provide a non smooth-as-glass grip surface for your fingers and palm.
A good case will also have a raised bezel on the front so any potential screen impacts from a drop on a flat surface will hit the bezel and not the screen.
I suspect this is more about isolating the phone from the radio energy sinks of the human body (surface moisture on the skin & saline blood plasma) than anything to do with the glass itself.
Any suitably insulating (capacitive) enclosure (such as a "napkin swan", teacup, etc.) which preserves a largely vertical orientation (perpendicular to the local ground plane) should work just as well. We're still comfortably within the far-field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-field performance envelope for transmission, but well within transmission-line power transfer regimes at these frequencies with a cell-phone-sized antenna.
If the glass were lead crystal (extremely unlikely in the bog-standard bar tumbler pictured), there's more potential for interference and a spatial locus of signal above the noise floor is possible. Typical window and utensil glassware is essentially transparent to these frequencies.
Top colleges, military training, and most early stage start-up environments all have either explicit or implicit cultures where part of the values indoctrination is to "achieve under fatigue".
It isn't about what's optimal for long-term productivity or health. It's about gauging mental toughness and weeding out those individuals without an adequate level of committment to that particular community's values.
If the individual can perform adequately under an extreme depravity of conditions, then they can be expected to excel, or at the very least, fall back to an acceptable baseline of trained performance when provided the surfeit of resources available under day-to-day tasking.
I can't help but be reminded of "hacking" casino comp systems. Please.
In truth, this trip cost well in excess of $418 due to the other purchases and time tie-ins involved.
I'm all for leveraging advantages, but there's leveraging, and then there's outright "gaming". The former can yield value when you factor in your time & attention, reasonable workflow safety margins, and compliance with spirit of a policy. The latter is merely a mental exercise to optimize a series of transactions around a single parameter, in this case the present dollar cost, to the complete exclusion of externalities.
At least he got some follow-on web traffic for his efforts.
