Whelp the first charge only got 6 miles. I intentionally didn't charge it after the first round trip to work to see what the range is like and on the second round trip I did get home but the roundtrip to my office is 3 miles and on the second roundtrip it dropped from showing two out of four bars to zero bars and beeping at me that it was urgently low on battery. Gonna futz with the settings to see if I'm pushing it unnecessarily hard but if I can't get it to 9-10 miles on a charge without severely limiting the speed it's going back to Costco. I guess next up is the Segway Ninebot ES3Plus they have if it comes to that. The one I have is advertised for 15 miles and range the Segway is rated for 28 miles so even if the ratio of actual:advertised is the same that's 11 miles, which is a lot more usable.
I knew the range would be lower than advertised since that's true for all of these scooters since they'll pick someone who's like 170 lbs no cargo as their baseline but this is extreme. For something like home->doctor->office->home that's 4.5 miles, so 9-10 miles is comfortable cushion for if I want to do another stop out of the way somewhere on a day like that, whereas ~6 miles is either "have to carry the thing into the office to charge" (and despite being lighter than other scooters it's still too heavy to do that all the time) or be sweating about doing anything other than going straight home/only making additional stops that are directly on the path between work and home.