Slashdot Mirror
Are Rebates Scandalous?
theodp asks: "Motley Fool offers a dead-on take on the computer mail-in rebate fulfillment process--Once I receive your 'claim,' I will begin to 'process' it. Assuming that you filled out all the information correctly, and assuming nothing is missing, and assuming your claim doesn't get lost somehow, and if you call or write a few times to check on your claim's status, then I will mail your check within 10 to 12 weeks. Maybe. Or maybe it'll be four to six months. Or never." What are your thoughts on rebates, and have any of you noticed who, at least in the computing industry, is more trustworthy with rebates than others?
Update by J :
Here's the
short version
of the article.
At times I forget to send them in. What should happen is the selling company, should take it upon themselves to handle the rebate for you in store, instead of you dealing with the nonsense paper trail of it.
Like most Americans, I like my free money right here, right now -- mostly because I won't remember the purchase when I finally get the rebate. Getting a check for $50 in the mail three months after I bought that hard drive is like winning the beauty contest in Monopoly. Wow, fifty bucks out of thin air, cool!
So for that reason I don't like rebates. I like my savings at the register, not in my personal cash-flow analysis at the end of the quarter.
levine
They're buying your personal information so they can either use it to fill your mailbox with their junk or everyone's junk. There's no other reason for them not to do rebates at the POS/cash register.
Regarding computer-related rebates, they are even worse. I bought some CDR media that was "$2 after $10 rebate". I had a weak moment and figured it was worth the $10. The Best Buy receipt offered a way to file your rebate request online. I thought, great! Mailing rebate requests is sure lame!
So I go to punch in the rebate information and am presented with a page that I can print and USPS mail in.
Completely worthless, except now some additinoal "rebate processor" company also has my information.
They send you a check in return for the marketing information that you provide them. If they don't send a check, complain until they do. How is this a scandal, again?
[
It's about as much of a sham as extended warranties. I mean, if you lose the paper, you're SOL. Some can track it to your in-store credit card, but still, who keeps their items long enough to need 'em?
And about the rebates -- I was once promised a 10% refund by Sears for getting a $700-ish washer/dryer combo. I got $30 back, because only ONE of the appliances was $400. Incredible. If they're going to give a rebate, I think it should be done right away. Or just have the price lower in the first place. Meh.
Danish != nationality
Um, yeah I want some guy to hold my money; who has no accountability, etc.
Ever notice when they send the check back to you it never says what the original item you bought was? This is so you cannot be pissed at the store or manufacturer because it took forever!!
Boycott teh mail in rebatez!!!!!!!!!!1
I was beginning to think I was the only one who wasn't happy about being a rebate slave.
About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung LCD and an ATI 9000. Both came with rebates, both were properly filled out and sent in at the same time. I have received the ATI rebate, but Samsung is out to lunch. Naturally, the ATI rebate was much less than the Samsung.
Definately companies count on at least some percentage of their rebates not being paid out: someone loses the necessary paperwork, someone forgets to fill it out, someone is too lazy, etc...
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
Within the time they specified too. Right at the end of it mind you. It's just another way to get your demographic information for mailing lists.
The rebate form on Microsoft Money and TaxCut says to send the "barcode" off the box, so I dutifully cut off the barcodes, sent them in and waited... about 6 weeks later I get a letter saying that what they actually wanted wasn't the barcode, but the entire box bottom showing the name of the product, or in other words, I'm outta luck.
If you plan on purchasing MS Money or TaxCut, make sure you substitute the word barcode for entire bottom of the box is you want to have any hope of seeing a rebate.
I filled out one for a cell phone I got. I made real sure that I filled out everything correctly, but it was about 5 months before I recieve my 50 bucks. I doubt I would have done anything though if they never did send the money, probably would have forgotten by then or just too much hassle. It does seem to be a pretty good racket. Makes people feel good thinking they will recieve a nice fat rebate check on an overprice computer. American consumers love deals, and what sounds better than free money.... maybe some hard cold cash in my hand on the spot, but that would defeat the purpose of borrowing peoples money until they either forget or give up. Just my thoughts, I have friends like that who borrow and hope you forget.
Part II
Rebate tracking - great forum from FatWallet.com, search for company name before you purchase anything that requires a rebate.
I would recommend Dell, Amazon.com and Viking Components for rebate deals - never had problems with either one of those, and just got another $50 Dell Axim rebate in the mail today. The rules are always clear, the fulfillment is on time.
The whole rebate thing does strike me as odd - if they can pay you back the money, why not lower the price right there in the store? You still have to pay state sales tax on the before-rebate price.
After all, you pay sales tax on the full amount of the sale. That adds up to a lot of revenue that does not get refunded.
I purchased RAM at WorstBuy a year ago. I sent in the rebate forms AFTER making copies. The manufacturer said 4-6 weeks. After hearing nothing after 5 weeks, I called them and they told me that they never received my forms. I sent them duplicates return receipt mail. I received the return receipt form back with a sloppily scribbled signature. I called them back after 4 more weeks and asked where my rebate is. You guessed it. They never signed for my rebate forms because I couldn't read the signature on it. :P
Luckily for me, the manager of the store refunded my rebate amount. I always think twice now before purchasing with a rebate, and usually pay a bit more just so I won't have to go through that crap again.
It took most people 5+ months to get their rebate when purchasing a T-Mobile Sidekick (Danger Hiptop). How different is this from the scams where you buy things "for free" by plopping $200 on something and getting a $200 rebate (6 months later, after they've invested your money)?
Interesting thread about the T-Mobile Sidekick Rebate madness -Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
I would think the Slashdot crowd (if I may generalize) would be (i) savvy enough to shop for the best deal, whether a rebate was involved or not, and (ii) more apt to get the details right, and thus be more likely than the average consumer to actually receive the hoped-for check.
I've filled out a few of those forms in the last year and gotten the money -- and the only one I didn't, the rebate company sent me an email saying, "you didn't send in the original UPC; if you have it, mail it to us and you'll get the rebate." I looked in the attic (where we throw all boxes) and sure enough, I'd forgotten to clip it. Still waiting for that check. Granted, they don't come fast, but at least they're honest enough to tell you, "This... is gonna take a while."
Just one person's experience...
I went though the iomega class action law suit way back when, and came out ahead. The rebate was something like $40, but when it was all said and done, I ended up with &70 worth of disks, and other stuff plus the check for $40.
The chaces of being part of the class action is worth the trouble, in my opinion.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Mail in rebates suck. I'm don't want to wait 6 months for a $10 check when I can buy it on pricewatch.com for $10 cheaper anyway. It's funny, when you own them money it better be on time, when they owe you money it takes 6 months. It's all a scam. They could easily sell it for the after rebate price. What they're hoping is that alot of people will forget to send it in before the rebate expires and they'll get to keep the money. It's retail's way of hopefully charging more than the actual price to people who don't bother. And people who do bother get screwed up the butt.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
When you think about it, companies offering rebates could have as well simply lowered the price of the product and make more convinient for consumers.
However, they *know* that most people: (1) forget to send them, (2) lose them, (3) fill them incorrectly (even a misspell of a city name is "wrong" for them, (4) or simply cannot fill them because the box where the product came in (and that had the barcode scan number on it) has been long gone in the trash.
In other words, it's a way for them to screw you. I have to admit I only received *one* check in my entire life out of a rebate, and it arrived so long after the purchase that I had already forgotten about it.
My thought is that any self-respected company who *trully* cares about customers, should simply drop rebates and lower the price of the products (even if not by as much as the value of the actual rebates).
I also submitted a rebate to Amazon a little while back... haven't been home to check the mail (I'm at a university on the other side of the country), so I don't know if I got the check from them or not.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If you plan on getting a rebate from Amazon, do not trust the item's description. Make sure you view the fine print on the rebate before buying. I purchased something that had a "$50 mail-in rebate", and after the item arrived, proceeded to print out the rebate claim form from Amazon. Not until then did I notice that the rebate required the purchase of a second product.
Curiously enough, these are much the same set of reasons that a rebate is bad for the consumer.
There is one other bad thing about rebates from a consumer's point of view: you pay sales tax on the non-discounted price of the item.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The industries that exploit aspects of human nature or vital necessity are the ones that are the most successful. This is why rebates are work. Companies know that people are typically lazy and don't fill out the rebate forms. People make mistakes. Mail gets lost. Someone fails to send in an original receipt. There's only a certain percentage of these that get fulfilled, which means the companies pocket the difference.
Then there are the deals that are "too good to be true" like the $20 product - $20 rebate, and you end up paying the sales tax. Who gives away free product? Let's face it - people are looking for the best deal, but can you with any reliability get something for nothing? There should be some alarm bells going off.
In addition, the civil liability for non-fulfillment is minimal for the company offering the rebate and/or the fulfillment house, because they are in another state, or a lawsuit becomes more trouble than it's worth for the consumer. Of course, this isn't the case for large-scale issues, but organizations like the FTC are typically slow to act and/or have a full plate with other more serious cases.
In short, the more people tolerate rebate programs, the more they will proliferate. You will need skills and time to be able to get the money back that you would've had in your pocket. It's no skin off a company's back. But it's money out of your pocket.
Oh, and btw, I sent in a rebate for two Lexar memory sticks, but - surprise - they only processed my rebate for one, even though I highlighted the quantity of 2 on my Amazon.com receipt. Caveat emptor, folks...
They're buying your personal information so they can either use it to fill your mailbox with their junk or everyone's junk. There's no other reason for them not to do rebates at the POS/cash register.
Are you crazy? There's a big reason: most people are so damn lazy and/or disorganized that they never send in their rebate. If companies gave the rebate right there at the cash register without the customer doing anything, they would HAVE TO pay out the bucks. I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how many rebate offers actually get sent in by consumers. I bet it's a fairly low percentage. It's brilliant: the company gets to advertise a low price for their product but, in actuality, they rarely have to make that big a sacrifice.
GMD
watch this
Assume you won't receive the rebate when deciding whether to buy a product (just assume you'll pay full price), and then if you get the rebate, consider it a bonus.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
...they like to hold it in the first place is that the company is actually making money off the interest of it's holdings. That's part of the reason it takes 6 friggin' months for you to get your money back. In that time, the vender(like Viewsonic, where my friend works) will have made some more change off that original $200 rebate of yours that they hold.
If you think
...fail to smile about their tax refunds?
Wow, how completely ironic is this? I just got home from work and found a rebate filled out to me from Best Buy for a product I never, ever purchased. Then I go to sit down at my computer and surf to slashdot only to see this.
It completely boggles the mind.
Seriously, most of the time, I can buy gear via mail order for about what the store price minus rebate is. I've had enough rebates "lost" to be very, VERY wary of them. Just give me a decent price to begin with and quit wasting my, the post office's, and some minimum wage working stiff at the processing center's time.
I can't help wondering whether these rebate processing companies aren't a variant of the coupon fraud crooks, where criminals gather those grocery store coupons and submit them for credit without anyone actually buying any items. al-Qaeda is/was involved in those. "When big corporations use rebates, they're funding terrorism!" (cue scary music...)
I'll give Best Buy credit for having the best rebate system out there. They print out separate "rebate receipts" and rebate forms at the cash register. I emailed them a complaint about the racks of rebate forms they used to have at their stores so I'd like to think I had something to do with that, even though they didn't quite get the hint that rebates in general are fscking repulsive. I think I've received every rebate since they started their new system though, averaging 2 months turnaround time.
Dell Canada is very bad.. or you could say very good at that game.. So I bought a computer last summer... and first I had to find the rebate form. I didnt find it on the website, so I called the Dell person and she filled it on the phone for me.. So I though, ohh great service! (I was wrong).. But I ended up finding it on the website (by accident) a few days later, and it said I had to include all kinds of papers with it. So I wasnt really sure that the dude on the phone did it right, so I printed the form, filled it, signed it and mailed it.
One would expect that this would have been enough. But ohh no.. About two months later (they said to wait 6-8 weeks...), I still had no news, so I went to the dell website which sends me to "www.rebatestatus.com".. Which is a 3rd party company that does just that, handling rebate forms. I didnt find my application on their website, so I called this company. The person there said they did not find my form, but that I could refax it to them for quicker processing.. 2 weeks instead of 6. So I faxed. A few months later I called backs was again told that after X weeks, it was not longer that 3rd party, but Dell that handled the stuff. So I called dell and the guy there said he'd fill a "template" and that they'd call me back within a week with more info. Clearly two weeks later, nothing.. So I called Dell again and they next dude filled another template. They did that thing about three times. And then the next time I called, the story had changed, I was to call another number, where I had to enter my name and postal code (on the phone) and clearly the system there didnt find me, but I could leave my number and someone would call back.. But clearly no one called back.. Or they only called when I wasnt there and did not leave a on my voicemail. I called this number about 3-4 times and never got anything from them... So I decided to call back the main custumer support, and like at the 10th call they girl said.. ohh you are too late for this other service, you are actually too late, but you might want to fax your form to the Dell Canada Rebate Center (probably a secretary in a micro-office).. so I faxed it there.. and about 7 months after buying my computer Dell finally mailed me the check...
I would fully understand someone who is not a student and dooes not have the kind of free time that I have would have been left with 0$... This HORRIBLE process must same Dell thousands if not millions of dollars... in unpaid rebates....
I move every few months. And I have an affinity for tech hardware. I have yet to have a problem with rebates, and have always received them in the allotted amount of time. Though I have heard plenty of stories of people who haven't.
One was for a M$ sidewinder game pad... check came. Never got any form of spam.
One was for Covad to refund my installation ($100!!). Of course, the agent said it was still valid when the rebate clearly said it expired months ago. However, wrote a false date on the form, sent it in, got my cheque.
There's probably a few others. I'll never COUNT on them, but it'll definately sell me on some item that is otherwise equal with the competition.
...so I always shop for the best deal assuming I won't get around to sending in rebates.
Usually this means buying the $40 spindle of CDR instead of the $50 with a $20 rebate.
There are occasional offers worth it. Once bought a PowerBook that got me a free PCMCIA modem if I sent in the magic post card. Though, I would have bought that anyway.
Start Running Better Polls
If the Store ever even advertises a rebate price, don't buy that item. If that was really the price, the store can fill out the rebates themselves.
I have sent in ~10 rebates in my life.
I have received: Zero.
And once you've sent your rebate, guess what? You can't even prove that you ever actually bought it, let alone that you sent off for a rebate.
It doesnt matter if there's some honest rebates out there- the system is set up like fraud, no way to check, no way to prove, and no system in place making sure that they are real.
At least when you give your CC# on the internet, you can check your bill.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Too late for this year.
Next year demand a refund on all the non-sales sales tax you
paid. This must be a tidy sum and a few thousand
people asking for their share back might make
some states think about the benefits of "rebate" programs
and their tax status.
looks an awful lot like eight dicks deep. (about halfway through the article)
Like Livine, I don't bother with mail-in rebates. I don't for the same reason I don't do the special points credit cards. It is just not worth managing it and following after to make sure I get the good deal.
I don't think they are scandalous, by and large, but they are there to serve the manufacturer's marketing interests.
SCO to Hell
I have participated in many rebates. I have had very good success. I have received approximately $500 in rebates. I use those free return address labels from charities on them to save time and ensure clarity. However, I have found some of Best Buy's adverts misleading. For instance, they post a sign in front of the Linksys 10/100 PCI NICs saying 9.95 each when you buy two with multiple rebates. They imply you need to buy two to get the rebates and that they are marketing the fact that you can get 2 for $19.95. They even print you two sets of rebate receipts and forms for each product. The fine print says 1 rebate per household. I still took a chance and the 37 cents for the stamp. DENIED, I got one rebate and none of the seconds. Same thing when they ran the same type of promo for D-Links. Maybe I am missing something but I don't consider myself too dumb.
Plain and simple. The whole purpose of rebates is to rip people off by maximizing the likelihood that they won't get it, for whatever reason. For example, making it look like junkmail when it finally comes after 6 months and the person has already forgotten about it. Or they could just "lose" half the rebates, and nobody would ever notice because they're not guaranteed to come back within a year anyway. The only legitimate purpose of rebates is to give the rebate supplier what amounts to an interest-free loan with no deadline to pay it back. IMO, rebates should be banned. They're just a pain in the ass. I want to be able to buy a pack of 100 CDRs for $10, not $48.99 minus four separate $10 mail in rebates. The fucking postage costs more than the interest they're collecting on it for 4 months. It's an economic waste.
Repeal the DMCA!
I've bought quite a few products with the rebates, but the rebate process is a hassle. I have had rebates "rejected" because I forgot something (usually, the damn UPC code from the box). I've gotten other rebates where they give you less than 5 days to get the rebate in! There definately doesn't seem to be any uniformity in what they want you to submit.
So unless I have to have something right away (which is almost never), I just order it online.
The "rebate" price at BestBuy or CompUSA usually just brings it down to the "online" price anyway!
-A
A little less than a year ago i bought a Maxtor 160Gb hard drive that was advertised as like $200, after $30(store) and $40(mftr) rebates. I bought the drive, got both my rebate recipts and the forms, sat down to fill them out, and hey, guess what, BOTH CompUSA and the manufacturer wanted an original UPC, no photocopies. There being only 1 UPC on the box i was SOL on the $30 rebate, kinda sucked.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The rebate coupon that came with my Palm had the option to give me a free keyboard instead. I took that option, and it arrived in a few weeks. Also, Palm is a notch up from other rebates out there, as they allow you to fill it out online instead of snail-mailing a silly form.
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
...they're a PiTA, and that's bad enough. The only thing more annoying than adding the cost of the rebate back on to the advertised price is waiting in line behind people with coupons...
...hmmm... actually... having the clerk ask me if I have a "club card" is pretty annoying too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
HINT to the wise:
Tiger Direct, fine store otherwise, is a complete scam on rebates, from my findings.
Every rebate offer wants "a copy of the reciept".
Included in the shipments from Tiger, you get a "Packing Slip".
On 5 different occasions, out of 5 tries, my rebates have come back as a postcard, "sorry, you didn't send a reciept.
I called Tiger. They said my e-mail confirmation letter was my reciept. Print that, and go.
Tried that 3 times. Included both the e-mail "reciept" and the "packing slip".
3 failures.
God, I'm a slow learner.
It's a big-assed scam. Tiger is otherwise a fine company to work with, just realize that the price you pay is the price you pay, and that rebates are a big fat lie.
The trickiest rebate offer I dealt with involved cutting off thick cardboard UPC stickers. Unfortunately the company in question had three different bar code stickers on the box -- all apparently different. Yet only one was acceptable for the rebate. By the time I found out the wrong one had been sent in the rebate was over. Very, very annoying and ended up "costing" several hundred dollars.
I bought a Verizon phone last summer. By signing a 2 year contract I could save fifty bucks on a nice flippy phone. Sweet, so I sign up and got the phone. I sent in a copy, rather than an original of the UPC. The company taking care of the rebate(definitely not Verizon, I forget their name) would not accept that, so they sent me a letter. I needed to respond in letter, with the original UPC, within 7 days of the printing of the letter I received. It arrived on a Saturday, when I was out of town. Saturday was day 5. Statistically, they know they can screw some of us out of our money. And all I have to show for it is this shitty caller-id full of "unavailable" numbers from solicitors and piles of junk mail.
Open source- the greatest equalizer mankind has ever seen.
I hate mail-in rebates. Either you get a rebate or you don't. They should make a law that the customer can give the rebate form directly to the cashier and immediately get the rebate deducted from the purchase price. Then the stores can mail the paperwork around and wait for checks, and call, and get impatient/annoyed...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I have mailed in rebates from Staples many times, and have always had the rebate come back within a week, two at most (yes thats right). Bestbuy is prompt too. Perhaps the worst is Amazon. I am getting my 200$ rebate on my cell only now (after puchasing the instrument in November). That too, after they initially posted the check to the wrong adress.
Don't buy things based on the rebate price at all. Only think about the retail price. If the retail price is well above other competative items that don't require rebates don't bother with buying the more expensive product. There is no guarantee you'll get the rebate back anyhow.
Too often I'll see something that has a generous rebate be priced well above normal retail level. I simply don't trust the rebate to be fulfilled and even if it is, you're giving the company a free 4-6 month loan.
Oh, and I think that warranty registration cards should be completely unecessary. If you have a companies product with a valid serial number and you call them on the phone they will usually support it.
on MSFT Flight Sim was so small I had to take it to that guy in the mall that writes your name on a grain of rice so I could fill it out properly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I assume that a rebated product is overpriced to compensate for the rebate. I don't like processing rebates, so on numerous occassions, I have purchased a competitors product instead to avoid getting overcharged on a product I would have bought anyway at the non rebate price. The rebate made me change my mind.
I really don't care about the loss of indentity nor how many lists I get put on nor waiting 6-1000 weeks to get a check; I want 100 CD-R's for $5 (with tax on the original price, thats $6.50, or 6.5 cents a CD). It's that simple.
However, I've had my share of issues:
I've been screwed by PNY twice (those f*ckers...)-
The first time I bought two sticks of ram, but only got the rebate on one of them. It wasn't "Clearly" marked that there was a limit.
The second time, they said "the offer period had expired"- now either Best Buy or they screwed up, because within 1 DAY of purchase my rebate was in the mail.
So I learned an important lesson- FUCK A DAMN PNY, they will never get my money again.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
most people are so damn lazy and/or disorganized that they never send in their rebate
Exactly. And all these are the same people who will spend an hour or more reading through slashdot forums regarding how big of a "hassle" it is to take 3 minutes out of their lives to fill out their name and address, put it in an envelope and drop it in the mail box. God forbid they actually get off their fat super-sized ass and walk all the way to the mail box.
I bought some RAM at CompUSA with a $20 mail-in rebate. I filled out the rebate form and mailed it in, only to receive a reply that I didn't purchase the product during the rebate dates--even though I did, according to the receipt and the sign at CompUSA. My attempts to contact the company since then and clear up the dates have failed.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
is, believe it or not, handling of rebates with turn around time of less than 3 weeks. As for the rest, I had about 50% chance of getting a rebate check, with average length being over 2 months.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
One thing people don't realize is that many times a rebate is just a sneaky way for a particular retailer to get around a MAP (Minimum Advertised Price). Say XYZ Company sets a MAP of $300 for a given product. Bob's Computer Warehouse and Discount Footwear Emporium can advertise that product as "$250 ($300, with $50 mail-in rebate)" and still be within the letter, if not the spirit, of XYZCo's MAP policy.
In almost all of these cases, the sole reason for offering the rebate is to get you in the store, and most of the time the rebates are handled by a third-party company. The retailer has no interest in fulfilling the rebate - they got you into their store, and chances are pretty good you bought more than just the advertised product while you were there.
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
A-z computers jaked my chain for two weeks on a Lite-on cd-rw drive.
Then I went to COMPUSA and get a sony (rebaged lite-on) for about the same price (when you factor in shipping cost) after mail-in rebate.
So if you add that two weeks, it was cheaper and better to go to compusa.
I get the product when I want it, and I don't have to play around with RNA numbers and totally clueless minimum-wage working stiff on the phone.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Are those the same?
Don't have stuff like that over here. Always puzzles me when you see reports on poor US citizens, paying for their food with food coupons. Are that welfare coupons, or something they cut out from a magazine?How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
I'd like to go on the record that I've purchased about 5 items on rebate from Best Buy over a 2 year period and I have never received a rebate. I'll never purchase from Best Buy ever again - rebate or not.
Schedule your world with ScheduleWorld.com http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/ (Java Web Startable)
I once bought a Boca Modem (which is no longer in business) a few years back, and applied for a rebate. I took awhile, but eventually sent it in. They sent it back saying that I sent it in too late; at which point I realized they were trying to weasel out of paying me (and it was only $5). I immediately replied stating that nowhere on the official terms did it say that I had to send it in within a set period of time (their period was unreasonbly short) - which was true - there was nothing about it at all. Needless to say, a few weeks later I recieved a check.
My lesson was to never trust rebates again. They'r e just a sham.
The thing is, nine weeks after sending in a rebate, many people forget, and companies bet on that by conveniently 'forgetting' to send it your check.
I had 4 checks coming to me. One was the $30 Toast rebate I got through the Apple Retail Store, one was the $30 rebate for buying TurboTax State, $70 or something was from CA state, and $370 from the Federal Government. I have recieved 3 of them. Which one took the longest?
Hint: it wasn't the feds.
Yup, Intuit takes longer to process a $30 rebate than the Federal Government takes to process my income taxes. Man, how would you like to have "Slower than the Feds" on your feature list...
1. You pay sales tax on the rebated amount, but you don't get it the sales tax back. (Does the state get this money, or does the vendor keep it?)
2. If you buy several rebated items and forget to do a separate transaction for each one, you will only have one "orginal receipt" required by each rebate. But if insist on a separate credit card transaction for each item, the people impatiently waiting behind you in line are, well, not appreciative.
3. I got a "double rebate" in December for a monitor at Microcenter, advertised as such in their flyer, and was given different two rebate forms. But each rebate required the original bar code. After several phone calls, they finally said to send in a copy of it for one of the rebates (and the customer service rep said many people were calling about this) and "keep a copy of all paperwork", but I've yet to see either of the rebates.
4. Sometimes the warranty policy requires you have the original receipt, not a copy. But you've sent the original to the rebate center.
5. With the bar code cut off, you lose the opportunity to refund/exchange the item in most places.
6. And finally the whole thing is such a PITA - wasted postage, wasted time, uncertainty and doubt that you dotted every i and crossed every t required by the form. With no guarantee that you'll get anything back unless you are prepared to keep meticulous records and make many phone calls, waiting on hold for ages, trying to trace down "lost" rebate submissions.
i bought a sony camera last year.
;-)
and sent in the rebate a week after it expired.
nonetheless, they sent me a check for $100.
thank you sony!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Rebates have always seemed a joke to me. They do take weeks and that's only when there aren't any 'problems'. There have been two instances where I haven't been screwed. Once with HP and more recently, once with Lexmark. Lexmark seems to be right on top of things when it comes to sending their customers rebates and free stuff. *hugs her crappy Lexmark printer*
HP gave me a $150 rebate on my PC, and a $50 one for my inkjet. Had to wait 8-10 weeks, but it did come. I've had good luck with rebates...I do remember to include everything that's asked for and not to scribble illegibly. I'm sure the companies that do them know they'll only pay a percentage of them since people forget to send them in, or don't send all the required stuff.
All of the rebates are sent to PO Boxes, so one can't mail it with reciept confirmation. The fulfillment house has an easy out of saying that they never recieved it, or didn't recieve it in time.
With rebates accounting for 1/3 of some product's cost, (hard drives come to mind) it's just not a risk I'm willing to take.
Witold
www.witold.org
witold.org
If you buy something relatively cheap such as two packs of CDR cases, send them in separately, purchase separately so you have two receipts. Otherwise you will get a card back with "Sorry you have exceeded the rebate limit per household..." etc and they will keep your receipt and send you zero for even one package.
Thanks fucking Fellowes
I have submitted over 6 Frys rebates and everyone has been rejected - something always seems to be missing. At least they send me a notice saying so. I have nothing against Frys (you can see I have kept buying stuff from there), but before I buy I always remember to translate their advertised price to the price without the rebate before deciding, because I don't even bother any more.
I have been screwed multiple times over rebates.
The biggest offender was Visioneer, the maker of
parallel port scanners. Couple of years back,
they had a really attractive deal (with mail-in rebate)
on one of their models. I and multiple friends
bought that model at around the same time.
All of us sent the rebate coupons in. Not even one
got the rebate.
They want you to send them the barcode from
the box. Fine. But if they don't acknowledge the
receipt, you are screwed. Because you don't have
the original anymore! This is a standard trick
that they play. "Sorry, sir, we have no record of
receipt of anything from you".
To make matters worse, their linux does not support
Visioneer scanners. By the time I figured this out, it was too
late to return it.
Magnus.
I'm wise to them now - I don't buy anything on rebate, anymore. Fooled twice, any more and it is my fault.
Of course, there are a lot of suckers out there, and I don't expect rebates will go away any time soon. But that's just like every other scam that is being perpetrated in the name of "business" these days.
Spam, junk mail, unsolicited phone calls, club memberships, point systems, etc., etc. Some schmucks use them.
That's why they'll never go away. The only thing you can do is educate your children against them (and your significant other).
I purchased an lcd monitor from office depot with an offer of $100 mail-in rebate.
to make a long story short, here's how I got even:
I located the president of the SAMSUNG usa division that produces monitors, tracked down his office address and home address, and sent him (and 11 consumer product editors ) a letter signed in the name of the president with a description of the the policy of deliberately defrauding the public including articles from various publications.
My point was to let the upper management of these companies know that they cant hide and will be held personally responsible.
It's not just to make interest on the cash. Rebated products (especially the ones free after rebate) can spur large sales numbers to meet quarterly targets (ie. jacks up revenue and product sold for public disclosure)
I usually get them, the only ones I have never gotten were from MSFT. One was a sidewinder game controller rebate ($20 and never got it), and another was for MSDOS 6.22 (back in the day, and never got it either).
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Even if you believe you have complied with all the rules, the grantors can always find a way to find fault with your documentation.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I've bought two different machines from Dell in the last year. Both machines arrived almost a week early. One included a rebate; I received the rebate about six weeks after I returned the form.
I'm currently waiting on a similar rebate from Best Buy for a notebook I just bought; I'm hoping they're as good as Dell was.
I'd like thank /you/ for your complicity to these schemes that make life a pain in the ass for the rest of us. Life could be a whole lot more straightforward if there weren't so many numbskulls around to encourage deviant behavior.
Well around here we actually have a rebate department. Our rebate department handles all rebate request processing and keeps track of any pending requests. If a company fails to send a check in a reasonable period of time, our Rebate Department tracks them down and harrasses them until they send us the money.
Over the past four years this system has worked pretty well. We've only had one rebate deadbeat. Microsoft kept kicking back our request for a $75 rebate on Win2K. It was kind of odd, actually. They'd return the paperwork with a form claiming the request was incomplete and asking for the proof of purchase from the product box (included in our request and in the envelope they repeatedly sent back to our company). After four tries we finally got a check. Somehow I think a lot of people didn't get their $75 rebate. Of course, not everyone has a rebate department.
Many posts correctly point out that these discounts are designed so that many who intend to send them in never bother/ succeed. But there is actually a more subtle reason as well; the same reason that supermarkets use coupons (as opposed to just lowering the price).
That reason is price differentiation. If the company charges a high price, they sell few units at a high margin; a low price means more units a lower margin. By introducing these coupon schemes, they can charge different prices for the same product. Price-sensitive customers go through the trouble of filling in the coupons, insensitive ones don't. It is the best of both worlds!
Another example of price differentiation is university tuition. There it is called "financial aid" - a scheme clearly designed to make everyone pay exactly what they can afford (note: I am not saying that there is something wrong with financial aid; I am just pointing out that it is very much in the financial interest of the universities).
Tor
The only two rebates I've ever bothered with...
;-) got me an instant Verizon discount... combined with sending in my old phone (which I got free when I joined Verizon originally), and I had a full color top of the line cell phone for $120 after tax. 'course I had to wait 2 months for my rebate, but hey... better than paying full price and throwing out an old junky audiovox.
The first one was when I bought a flight joystick at Best Buy for $30 (it was on sale), took it home, and went online for updated drivers... only to see a front page ad of a $30 mail in rebate for that joystick.
The second was recently for purchasing my Motorola T720 phone, I could send in my old phone for a $100 rebate. Renewing my contract for 2 years (no biggy, I had just renewed it for 2 years a month before
- Chris Jacobson
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Anyone ever notice that when you buy a rebate-priced item at Fry's, the rebate form they hand you is ALWAYS for a similar item that is NOT the one you bought?
Why does Fry's do that? How does it benefit them?
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I recently bought some equipment at CompUSA and only when I got to the register I realized that the advertized price was after the mail-in rebate ... in other words I had to pay more than I thought. I figured though that at that point I'd spent so long chosing that I'd go ahead and make the purchase anyway. It turned out that I had about $30 of rebate coupons. When I got home I started filling in the coupons, but stopped to think about it before mailing them in. I came to a startling conclusion, which was that I would rather let them keep the $30 and stay off the mailing lists. The amount of aggravation that having my name on potentially countless mailing lists and receiving catalogue after catalogue for perhaps years on end made it a better deal to give up the money. Of course if someone said 'pay me $30 or I'll put you on a bunch of mailing lists' I sue them for extortion. But based purely on the merit of the two cases, without the moral question of which decision results in the best social consequence, I figured that staying off a bunch of mailing lists is probably worth about $30 bucks to me.
... in the future when someone asks for my address, I shall consider first: are they giving me something in return that I think is worth about $30. If not I shall decline to give my address.
That's rather enlightening information
Now, I know most of you don't buy computer equipment at Costco, but I must say their rebates are quick and painless!
As much of a scam rebates appear to be, at least in most cases you have a chance to develop an inkling of the crap you're getting yourself into prior to buying the product.
But here's the scam: Products that are advertised in ways that do not make the fact part of the "deal" includes a rebate. For example: products listed as purchase price minus rebate with insufficient indication of the rebate figured into the price. Even worse (and this pissed me of in a major way): I bought tax software a year ago that included "free" state income tax filing software. After I had purchased the original bundle, I learned that I actually had to spend more money to buy the state software and then wait 6 f ucking months for a rebate check to arrive.
A total fuc king scam. That should be illegal.
I never, ever consider a rebate when shopping for product. As the article indicates, usually the process of getting the rebate is more expensive than it's worth.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
...for the inventor of rebates.
Basically it's an interest-free loan to the vendor. You get to pay sales tax on the pre-rebate price, and then have to jump through hoops to maybe get the rebate months later.
The store ought to be required to hand you the rebate at the time of purchase, or submit the information electronically at the time of purchase...but then they'd actually have to give you the money, wouldn't they? Stores can take rebates and use them for reaction mass, as far as I'm concerned.
I purchased my last three computers with large rebates. Two of them were bundle packages that involved several rebates (from the computer manufacturer, printer manufacturer, store, etc). With all three computers, I sent in about 7 or 8 rebates, for a total of about $800. I got all of the money, on time, without ever calling the companies. I've sent in a ton of rebates, for everything from cell phones and dsl installation, to little $2 rebates for stuff at the grocery store. I've *never* not received a rebate.
Maybe it's karma. If you think the money's not going to come, it won't.
"Thank you for processing my rebate. I have marked my calendar to receive my rebate no later than (2 months to the day I mailed it.)" = Fill in () appropriately.
Just below this type your information from the receipt including SKU numbers, your mailing address and store of purchase plus how much you are expecting. Printing an actual two month calendar and highlighting the day of rebate is a nice touch.
I will gaurantee you will not have another "missing" rebate. They think, "looks like this guy would sue over a $5 rebate, we better get it right"
A buddy of mine goes a step further and puts:
"Consumer protection laws in my state require that rebates be processed in 8 weeks"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Could you use your credit card company to help out? I have always received my rebates, but have wondered if you put the sale in dispute saying you have not received all of the purchased items, if this might give you some leverage.
I just avoid the rebate process, since I know I'm too flaky to properly take advantage of them. I'm exactly the sort of person they'd love to get buying stuff with a rebate, since I'm bound to lose the rebate slip.
However, my brother recently bought something at Best Buy with a $15 mail-in rebate. The check nicely came back, but with the wrong name on it. How the hell do you fix something like that once they get it wrong?
A good friend of mine works for Continental Promotions Group, Inc, a Scottsdale, AZ company that processes rebates for Costco, Dell, and several other large corporations.
:)
... go into some office machine store and just feed the rebate form into a typewriter or whatever. At least make damn sure that the claim is clearly written... if you're a's look like o's you're bound for trouble. Assume that the person who will be processing your rebate is completely incompetent and natively reads Sanskrit.
Most of the stories I've heard are largely due to the incompetence of the home workers (many of whom do not speak english as a first language) that basically open the envelopes and enter all the relevant data. Their pay? US$0.08 an entry. Not the highest pay around--working dilligently and competently this comes out to about $10/hour.
The reason it takes 10 - 12 weeks is that CPG will usually invoice the company they're contracted with at the end of the month and there's considerable turnaround time. Costco, on the other hand, directly wires the rebate money to CPG--I got my $2 Dove soap rebate a couple of weeks after I mailed it in. Another reason to shop at Costco.
My friend works the phones at CPG and basically the problems that he handles with regards to Dell are data entry errors. From this I derive that it's best to type your application
Also, he sees a lot of situations in which the rebate didn't apply to the customer for whatever reason because a pushy uninformed Dell phonemonkey just wanted to get off the line and close the sale. Make sure that the product you're getting actually has an applicable rebate. Just another reason to not listen to salespeople and by your stuff online.
I didn't tell you this, but most rebates can be reissued for $20 and under cashed or not because it's too much trouble for CPG and their clients to work the specifics out of actually sending out a STOP payment. Get double the rebate simply by calling them and inventing some story.
The average rebate takes ten or so weeks to process, so mark that window on your calendar and a halfway point to remind yourself in a month to call up and check on the status of the rebate by calling up the 800 number.
Most of what the article bitches about is largely just symptomatic of lazy people forgetting receipts and the rebate itself. If the money is important to you, don't forget stuff. Don't throw anything away until you have confirmation that the rebate is on its way or you actually have the check in hand. It's not that difficult to stow a box in the garage.
Keep on top of things and you should have no problem... I got dicked by Ericsson for a hundred bucks because of some missing paper and by the time I called the window expired--this is what you get when you expect the rebate to come without problems! They of course said they sent a letter in response, I never got it. Buyer beware.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Slashdot seems to have weird flops when it posts stories, sometimes really late:
2003-04-11 04:37:21 Are Mail-In Rebates All A Scam? (articles,money) (rejected)
This was on MSNBC over a week ago.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Dell was good to me; it took awhile but was just about on the last day of the 8th week as they promised. ViewSonic took a bit longer than promised to get back to me with their rebate. I only just sent out my Motorola rebate two weeks ago, so we'll see on that.
sic
If I need to buy something that offers a substantial rebate, like $100 on a HDD, I have a friend send it in then get the money from them. I am not in "the database"
I am a non-person and I like it that way..
INGSOC...
Rebates are good for the most part.. I don't know why you'd *not* send them in, it's like free money, and you don't even have to leave the house. :P
That said, I did get ripped off once when buying an APC UPS... I got a prompt reply back saying "your rebate is invalid because you didn't buy it at OfficeMax or OfficeMax Online" (I believe).. when, of course, I *did* buy it at the OfficeMax Online store. Unfortunately I accidently threw away the notice, so I couldn't call them up and complain, though I have a feeling it wouldn't have helped anyway.
But, other than that, I've had all good experiences. My printer, my scanner, some CDRs, my CD-RW drive, and many other computer-y things have all been helped by rebates.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The only time I ever received a rebate check was when I sent it via certified mail. All other rebates I've sent through standard mail were conveniently "lost" in the mail.
Rebates are actually pretty nice. I scan everything I'm about to send in, save it and any avilable contact information, and usually do OK--although I just got a November rebate last week.
One of the nice thing about rebates is they're the last Luddite remnant of marketing that simply can't survive online--cf. the CyberRebate.com fiasco. On the offline, we conscientious [poorer] people make a profit because of the lazy [richer] people, and there's nothing wrong with that. Yay.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I have participated in many mail in rebates. In order to get them, every time, and I mean every single time, I have had to call and demand it. Even then I don't get my money back for many months, and sometimes up to a year. All of this despite claims that they will be "processed and sent within eight weeks" etc. and all of that time I have effectively spent full price (sometimes more) for the product(s) for which I participated in a mail in rebate.
There is one mail in rebate in particular that I am concerned about. This rebate, I have not recieved. The company claims I did not send in the proper UPC symbol. I have kept records of all rebates; I did in fact send the correct UPC symbol. Even with this proof of "compliance with terms" the company still refuses to send me my money. I do consider it my money.
Rebates are fraudulent, pure and simple. They are misleading and need to be outlawed in order to protect consumers.
Ok....it's nice to offer these rebates, but would it not be easier and more honest to just lower the price?? I think it's kind of unethical the way they do these rebates. They COUNT on people not doing rebates to pay for the ones who do and on some, they just take so long to send them back that you forgot about it. They have since made money again from re-investing the money in something that makes them money. I almost never go for the rebate unless the price itself is ok already.
Gorkman
I believe that Cendyne has to be the worst when it comes to rebates/unethical activities. I have yet to receive my rebate for a CD-RW I purchased over 6 months ago. 4 weeks after I mailed in my rebate form, they tried to claim that I did not include all the required materials, when I did. They claimed they wanted the serial number, but the rebate form only said to submit the reciept and the UPC. I resubitted with the SN and I am still waiting. I wonder how many others they did this same thing to...
Which is unfortunate because I prefer their products.
I've been waiting for a 10 week rebate from them since December.
The problem here is that not enough people realize the way these things work, and how they're generally getting ripped off... Otherwise, companies wouldn't bother doing this.
So instead of thinking that there should be laws, or accountability, or respect for the customer (I don't think any company is genuinely respectful. The ones that are are probably only faking it), keep in mind that it's our own fault for being idiots.
Stop buying things on rebate, stop your friends from doing, and make sure they know why.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
I've bought a number of items from Best Buy, not to push a store, and I've had very good results. Fantastic results even. Contrary to the topics thesis of everything being %100 correct or the company refuses to process the rebate, I've actually had Best Buy mail my rebate back to me denoting the error and pleasently, respectfully even, asking me to correct it in order to process the rebate.
It was a month after the rebate deadline for the second processing but they still honored my rebate and I received a $100 check in the mail 2-6 weeks later. I count myself lucky and I'll shop at Best Buy before going to others.
Of course, I also remember, when a child, that my mother sent out for an item on the back of a cerial box and it never arrived. Buyer beware, I guess.
It took me 18 months to get a $150 Sony laptop rebate. During several of the calls, the person at the rebate center was openly nasty. Finally, a sympathetic woman said the Sony rebate fulfullment center was allegedly guilty of fraud.
I called Costco/Price Club for a rebate, and they said, "Sorry you didn't get your rebate. We will mail you a new check in 6 to 8 weeks." I called in 6 weeks and they said the same thing. Finally, someone at Costco sent me a check that had been filled out using a typewriter. The Costco representative aknowledged that I hadn't gotten the rebate checks. She said Costco had sent them. My guess: They were lying. If there had been a possibility that I had cashed the "other checks", they certainly would not have sent me a check.
CompUSA is REALLY bad with rebates, in my experience. My experience with Fry's is that they sometimes sell defective merchandise really cheap after rebate.
It seems that when a company's marketing department really, really wants to damage the company's reputation, it does fraud with rebates. I don't forget who stole from me.
What amazes me is that companies have departments of fraud, and employees who are willing to lie to people about having already sent a check.
COMPLAIN. The only way to get your money is to complain often and politely but insistently.
COMPLAIN to elected representatives. Wish list: 1) 2 week maximimum time to process rebate, 2) Confirmation of receipt of rebate request on the internet within one week after receipt, 3) Return of all incomplete or not accepted rebates, 4) Heavy fines for intentional abuse of rebates.
I just bought a nice $80 Saitek X45 joystick from Best Buy. It came with two rebates. A $10 mail in rebate from Best Buy and a $20 mail in rebate from Saitek. When I read the instructions, they each said they required me to mail them the original UPC from the box...wtf
I've submitted many rebates...from a DVD player purchased at Ames in December of 2001 (mailed rebate that week), to a Microsoft keyboard purchased almost six months ago (mailed rebate that week), to my most recent purchase in January, a Viewsonic A90f+ monitor (rebate mailed that week). To date I have yet to see a single check. Oh...and I'm not going to hold my breath.
Dell has 2 rebates from me... I've heard nothing and been able to get no where with them on it. Not what I expected! And differs from other posting here.
Don't forget that the company can make a return by investing the "extra" money that you paid up front. Over a few months time with enough units sold they can recover the cost (or at least some of it) by investing it or at least using that capital in other places. Your money hard at work!!!
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
My most recent rebates were from Apple, filled out my slips and got my checks back within a week. Probably the best rebate experience I've ever had. Most times you forget about the rebate and it comes half a year later in the mail.
If you think about it, it costs the company more money to have a rebate department. They have to pay people to sort throough the things and then send the money back. There is more going on here than just "accidently" forgeting to send it back to you or the company making money off of people who forget to send it in. Its all about getting your name and address. Company X knows that if you purchased their items once, then there is a high probability that you will do it again. Having your address, e-mail, phone number etc. they can send you information on these "promotional offers" *cough* junk mail *cough*. Also companies can make a good deal of money by selling your name and address to other companies, especially if they have you tagged as a person who will likely buy high end electronics. Rebates are nothing but a marketing ploy and I hate them. I don't care about them having my name so much, its just easier to buy the part that costs $10 more and not worry about mailing in some form and then mysteriously recieving $10 in the mail six months later. It's not like I'm going to get all excited about a rebate check, "Hey everybody I got my rebate check on that monitor I bought six months ago, drinks are on me!" *everybody cheers*.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Coming from someone who actually used to sell these computers with the rebates, I can give you a view from the sales side. First off why there is rebates technically is because of two reasons. The rebates from the manufacturer are there because retail stores actually buy the products before they sell them to you. Instead of changing huge amounts of money between the manufacturer and the retail stores on a weekly basis, they just give the consumer the rebate to mail in and get the money straight back. For the "store" rebates, These are used to bring products to comparable prices to national competition. These are usually changed weekly to compete with other major retailers (ie best buy competing with compusa and so forth) and being a merchandising supervisor for best buy I can also say that they sometimes change midweek too to match local or national competition. Now you may ask why rebates, why dont they just take the money off? Well other than the obvious that if you dont fill it out right you dont get paid, how many of you have ever been in other countries and looked at thier prices? I returned from a trip from nothern europe a couple months past and I found that the prices were comparative, however they dont get any rebates. So basically they just pay what we all pay at the registers, no rebates no chance for money back. Keep that in mind next time your getting a rebate, basically your getting a chance for cash back that a lot of other countries dont get. Yea I agree, they're a pain. I work with them everyday so trust me I know :p
Morph
I bought TurboTax for the past few years and sent in the $40 (approximately) rebate with ALL of the information filled out correctly. I swear I spent at least 30 minutes putting together each rebate package, copying the contents in their entirety and mailing them on time from the post office. Out of $140 (approximately) that they owe me in rebates for YEARS now, I received only about ten bucks for a state rebate. I assure you that everything was done correctly.
Then, my mother bought a Sony laptop. There was a $100 rebate. I spent over an hour putting together the entire rebate package, going over the rebate checklist several times, and I *know* for a *fact* that I did it correctly. I also sent it in ahead of the deadline by nearly a month. A couple of months later, my dad (who checked my email) said that I got an email from Sony stating that there was some error in my preparation of the rebate papers. I got so pissed off at that point that I decided no longer to buy products that offer a rebate of any kind.
Yes, this story is absolutely true. Rebates are fraudulent and these companies get away with it because they know that most people consider it too much trouble to go after them for a rebate and the rest will call in a few times, so when lawsuit threats come, the company can shut them up by mailing the check then. Sony can go to hell. Intuit can as well.
COMPANIES, WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: Make the stores handle the rebate process. The store should charge me the price AFTER rebate and then deal with the distributor for the money, the same way as coupons are handled at the grocery store.
I am fairly determined to get my rebates when I feel that the rebate amount warrents the effort. However, last August Apple ran a program (or scam) whereby if you bought a new mac, a 17" iMac in my case, you could also order an Epson printer and get the full price of $99 through a rebate. Well, a great deal of time elapsed till I got my mac, since it was a new model at that point. Eventually though i recieved it and sliced the box up to get the needed UPCs and serials. Since the printer was for my dad, we put his name on the forms and submitted it to Apple. A week later we got a letter from Apple saying that the forms were not correct. So we supplied the serials and UPCs again. A week later another letter comes, same form letter. My dad then called them and asked why the form wasnt being accepted. The customer service rep quietly told him that he was being told to reject as many forms as possible. Luckily, however, he said he would send our check out as soon as possible. That transaction turned my nose to rebates and turned my dads nose to Apples shady rebates. I think its important to remember that companies can do a lot to get out of mailing your check. I'm sticking to rebates less than $50 just incase from now on.
When I see a rebate offer in the Sunday supplements or in any ad I first check pricewatch.com or one of the other street price places and see if the rebate is worth it. I never got the rebate from Comp*** for some RAM that was overpriced by 300% or more and the rebate was to make it free. I never do rebates from them anymore unless it's a POS coupon.
I've never been burned by vendors at pricewatch.com and buy almost everything major through them.
I got burned by Apple on some rebates (back when the B&W G3 came out). We bought like 5 of them for an office, I sent in the rebates to Apple with all the appropriate documentation.
The rebate deal was a free internal zip or $50. I sent in three zips and two $50s. I got two zip drives and none of the money.
I didn't complain because work bought the PCs and for my efforts I got two internal zip drives, but would have appreciated a third zip drive and $100.
I guess my point is that rebate reliability is all over the map, even with big companies with big budgets and big reputations. Which is partly why I never buy based on rebate pricing. I know I'll fuck up half the time sending it in and they'll fuck up the other half not sending the rebate.
I had to call in several times to get my K-Byte memory rebate, after I had followed the directions properly, and had the proper UPC code, and copies of everything.
they kept telling me "your UPC code is incorrect" and I said "the UPC is for the proper memory, I have copy of it on the box i bought it on, and I sent the cut out portion of that box"
eventually they sent me the rebate, it took them 16 weeks (4 months) and it really annoyed me and put me off of k-byte re-bates.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I've had 3 problems with rebates, personal experience. I have straightened out all 3, but in 2 of the 3 cases I had to involve the BBB.
AT&T wireless: the rebate form had a line for the contact phone, and another for the phone you bought.
They did not honor the rebate because they incorrectly entered the contact phone (my home phone) as the phone I bought. They required I resend all the information, which I did (2 stamps!), and they claimed they never got it. It took a *lot* phone calls and a grand total of 8 months. I was on their ass about it the whole time and they just did not even bother. When the BBB stepped in, AT&T simply credited my account the $50, and said they were preparing a lawsuit against the daughter company. I've seen no evidence of such, and I know they never bothered to grab the images I pointed them at off my website (got tired of wasting printer ink and stamps).
Comp USA- what can I say, they just don't want to give rebates. They even have a web site where you can view the money they don't plan to send you. I had one take over a year to get, and like a sucker, got nailed a second time. The corporate site claims you have to talk to the store manager where you bought it, the store manager claims it's a corperate issue. The BBB claims they should handle it, and they listen to the BBB.
Turbo Tax. Twice I've had to deal with them and they have (appearantly) mis-entered my ESN number, but at least they were kind enough to send me a letter saying I couldn't have it because the number was not valid. So another stamp, some more printer paper, some more printer ink, another envelope and you'll get your lousy $9.
Best companies I've dealt with? Believe it or not, Best Buy. They handle it. Every single time. I don't enjoy shopping there but damn they have some good deals from time to time, and they have never stiffed me on a rebate.
Another good one is Costco (used to be Price Club). They get extra points from me because I have sent off and received the rebate for items I returned without the UPC code. They took it and gave me all my money back.. I even told them that I'd removed the UPC for the rebate prior to discovering that it didn't suit my needs, and they didn't deduct a cent.
But that brings up another point about rebates- once you've cut that UPC, you're usually stuck with the item. So you're trapped between holding on to the item until you are sure it really stands up and (likely) forgetting about the rebate, or taking a chance and being stuck with something you didn't really want because you rushed to cash in that $20 rebate.
Number one rule of dealing with rebates: make sure you have a scanner. Make copies of everything you send when you send it, save the jpegs (thereby giving you a date), and once in a while glance in that folder. Delete the files where the transaction has completed, and contact the companies where it has not. Usually, you can get by with an email. Sometimes you have to use the phone. I don't think I've seen one yet where I had to send them a letter until after I talked to them- when they claimed that it was not accepted.
And the BBB (search google for better business) now has an online form to submit complaints. You can get the money, but don't consider the time it often takes. I know most rebates take more than an hour of wasted time forever lost, and most rebates are about $20. Tack on the stamps and you aren't fairing so well in the long run.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Rebates also take a long time to "process" because the company offering the rebate can earn interest on the money they return. The interest is then pure profit.
Bought the system, got the $100 rebate within three weeks without any further action on my part. I suppose there's some reason having to do with financial reporting why they would prefer to have $500 in revenue followed by an immediate $100 expense...
http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorr.htm#Rebate
I've speculated that part of the game is to encourage a business purchase by kicking back something to the individual buyer. As in, buy the product, submit the receipt for the full price, and collect the rebate personally. Your average corporate bureaucracy doesn't check for this, or even have a reasonable system to handle rebates.
Rebates used to be a way for a retailer to sell something for list price, with the manufacturer kicking back some moolah separately. That way, the retailer keeps their cash flow. So why do gateway and dell do rebates? If the purchase is direct from the manufacturer, then a rebate is just a short-term loan to a sleazebag company, counting on your forgetting to ask for your money back! -Chuck
---- Yow! ----
someone loses the necessary paperwork, someone forgets to fill it out, someone is too lazy, etc...
This is what really pisses me off about mail-in rebates. My first rebate that I got stiffed on was for RAM. The Best Buy guy said that I get a rebate for each stick of RAM I purchased (limit of two, so I bought two). We swung by the rebate rack of coupons to pick up the one we needed (this was before the rebates were printed at the register), only to find out that the rebate needed wasn't there. Long story short, I eventually got a rebate slip in the mail, filled it out with all the additional necessities, and mailed it in. Three months later, I got a check for half of what I was expecting...they gave me a rebate for one stick of RAM instead of two. I called up their "rebate department" to complain. The representative told me that I needed to fill out a rebate form for each stick of RAM. I told her that the rebate form specifically had a line that said "# of units purchased", and that two UPC labels were sent in with the rebate that proved it. Her response was basically this: Be happy with what you got, because it's too late to do anything more, and our office doesn't do anything about complaints other than document them.
My brother got stiffed on a hard drive mail-in rebate as well. He cut the UPC from the box (I know...big no-no, but when he saw that instructions to include the "UPC label", he did exactly that), put it in the envelope with all the other info junk, and mailed it in. He got a letter a month later saying that "insufficient information was provided"...specifically, the UPC label wasn't there. I knew that that was a load of crap, since I saw him actually put it in the envelope. He called up the company and was as terse as possible with them until he found an operator who told him that he could still get the rebate if he provided the hard drive serial number. So, that information was mailed back in with the original returned letter, rebate form, & receipt. A month later, he got back another letter saying that the "rebate was expired." He called them up and was told that there was nothing more that the company could do.
These rebate "offers" really bug me, because they're not fraudulent as long as companies "in good faith" offer rebates. But it feels to me for some of these companies, they'll try and hit their consumers up on any technicality they can find.
Pfft. The real scam is rent deposits. Is anyone in Manchester? Want to lay pipe to the head of a Mr. Mike J. Wood for me? I'll give you £100 of the £500 he owes me. It's a little difficult from here in Canada :)
Same scam, bigger stakes.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
I'll give PowerQuest points for getting a rebate right. I recently bought a discounted, out-of-date but unopened copy of Partition Magic from a chain store. I was amused to find a rebate offer inside. The rebate didn't have an expiration date, so I filled it out and mailed it in. Two months later, a rebate check arrived.
$5 copy of Partition Magic - $15 rebate = profit!
He brings up the previously unmentioned point that they get to check to make sure they only give out one rebate to anyone, which is part of the deal.
I purchased my new viewsonic monitor after christmas 2002 during the sales. I didn't bother to read the 'fine print' about it's expiration date so sat on it. I finally got around to noticing the paperwork and that the expiration date had been about three months from when I'd purchased it which in my case was about three days late. Quite angry at this I took the time to fill out the paperwork and send it in.
I really loath mail in rebates, but what I think is far scummier is the retailers who place this as the price of the merchandise in bold print and the real price in fine print. I've even seen several who have the rebate price on display when the rebate had expired. I normal do not deal with any company based on rebate price. I will not normally fill out any paperwork to get a delayed rebate deal. I only make purchase decisions based on full price and disregard the rebate. In this case the full price was a very good deal for the quality of the product.
Most rebates are not enough money for the time filling out their form, two photocopies, and postage plus the destruction of the box to get a UPC code. My only reason for filling out the paperwork was so that when it bounced I could see about causing the retailer as much grief as I could.
Well I got the check in the mail, I think I sent it in on March 5th or so and got it on April 15.
So that retailer is safe from me, for now.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
$1 rebates have to be just about the lamest thing out there. I bought an "Aim-n-Flame" BBQ lighter at Home Depot and noticed when I got home it had a $1 mail-in rebate. US$0.37 for the stamp plus a few cents for an envelope, it'll cost them US$0.10-0.15 to mail the thing to me... seems like a scam for the postal system.
Just in case you're wondering, yes, I mailed it in. It's the priciple of the thing
In less than 5 weeks, I had a cheque in my mailbox.
I'd buy an item with no rebate at 10% over what an item with a rebate would cost me in the store just because I don't like to do business with people who I suspect are lying to me. Rebates are a scam and I won't play that game.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If they cannot save me money on the spot I will purchase another brand. Period.
I am not a bank and I do not get paid interest for them to float the cash on a discount of their price, therefor if they cannot save me the money on the spot I will ignore the product all together.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Rebates are irrelevant to my computer purchase decisions.
Locally there are all kinds of CD-RWs and DVDs for "$30" etc. "with rebate" but they're $70-90 up front. Yeah, right.
No kidding... I know they don't sell computer stuff (actually they just started selling camera memory), but...
;)
RiteAid has a website where you enter in your reciept #, store, date, etc... and it pulls up the purchase for you, adding up any rebate. At the end of each "cycle", they email you a reminder to go to the website and click the "send me my check" button. No snail mail, no messy forms, no mistakes - it works every time.
If more manufactuers did this I think we would see more of a return on rebates... or less rebates because.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
My only advice: don't count on the rebate, and make a copy of everything before you send it in.
Connecticut has a Rebate Advertising law requiring retailers who advertise the net price of an item after deduction of a manufacturer's rebate to pay consumers the amount of that rebate when they buy the item. If the retailers don't wish to do this, they cannot advertise the after-rebate price as the final price to be paid by the consumer. Thus, there should be no confusion about the amount the customer must pay at the cash register.
Here is the law:
Sec. 42-110b-19. Advertising "free," "reduced," "discount," "below cost," or a rebate
It shall be an unfair or deceptive act or practice to:
(a) Advertise any merchandise or service as free by the use of the word "free" or any other terms of similar import when the merchandise or service is not, in fact, free (see (d) below). Failure to disclose any and all terms, conditions and obligations required of the consumer shall be a violation of these regulations.
(b) Advertise the price of merchandise or service as a reduced or sale price, or compare the price to a previous price unless the advertised price is lower than the actual, bona fide price for which the merchandise or service was offered to the public on a regular basis by the advertiser, for a reasonably substantial period of time prior to the advertisement or as a discount price, unless the advertised price is lower than the price being charged for the same merchandise or service by other sellers in the area; provided, however, in the case of a new product, if the advertised price is less than the price which the advertiser, in good faith, expects to charge after termination of the introductory sale, there is no violation of this subsection. The actual price after the sale shall be evidence of the advertiser's good faith expectations.
(c) Advertise the price of any merchandise as below cost, unless the price is, in fact, below the cost for which the merchandise was purchased and prepared for sale by the advertiser.
(d) Advertise merchandise or service as free or the price of merchandise or a service as a discount, reduced, or sale price if receipt of such merchandise or service is contingent upon the purchase of other merchandise or service at a price which is higher than the actual, bona fide price at which the merchandise or service was offered to the public on a regular basis by the advertiser for a reasonably substantial period of time prior to the advertisement, or at a price which is substantially higher than the price being charged for the same merchandise or service by other sellers in the area; provided, however, in the case of a new product, if the advertised price is less than the price which the advertiser, in good faith, expects to charge after termination of the introductory sale, there is no violation of this subsection. The actual price after the sale shall be evidence of the advertiser's good faith expectations.
(e) Advertise the availability of a manufacturer's rebate by displaying the net price of the advertised item in the advertisement, unless the amount of the manufacturer's rebate is provided to the consumer by the retailer at the time of purchase of the advertised item. A retailer will not be required to provide the purchaser of an advertised item with the amount of the manufacturer's rebate if the rebate advertises that a manufacturer's rebate is available without stating the net price of the item. For the purpose of this subsection, "net price" means the ultimate price paid by a consumer after he redeems the manufacturer's rebate offered for the advertised item.
One of my friend's dad taught me this method. Everytime you buy a rebate-type item that's not instant, make a photo copy of the receipt, the UPC code bars (the thing that they make you cut out so you can't return them), a form of provable valid date, and whatever else that you have to mail back. He would then use registered mail if the rebate is high enough, and then, send it out.
He keeps all the un-returned rebats in a folder on top of his computer. Eventually, over a long period of time, when the check NEVER comes, he would call them and ask. When things are completely going the wrong way, he would scan the information he kept and send it.
He told me often times when you show that you give a crap about that rebate, they will deliver you the check. He mentioned that he also will complain to BBB or some form of agency if the rebate falls through. But he did say that sometimes, the company would call the bluff back on you knowing that you would never bring a lawsuit or your complaint has any possible damage on their already pathetic image cough *TDK* cough.
Damn you! Give it back!
Anything that has a rebate is, in all likelyhood, already overpriced. Normally, if I compare the product with the rebate with other similar products, I find a better deal.
I shop with the mentality of "I want that and it's within my price range." I don't look for or count on rebates. Yeah I fill out the forms and send them in but at that point if I get a check it's just gravy. I've never bought anything because it had a rebate.
the post office makes money, so its not a waster of there time.
The min. wage worker gets paid, so its not a waste of there time.
it may be wasting your time. that depends on the worth of your time, vs. the rebate amout, which you wouldn't get if it was offered to everybody.
I've never heard of the couplon scam. Sounds intersting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Personally I don't even fool with them, or even consider the 'rebate' price when I buy. So they say $800 for a laptop, I look at the fine print. ($200 w/rebate) Hence I figure, "$1,000" is what the laptop costs, reguardless of any 'rebate'
;)
Companies will cheat, steal, and yes call their customers crooks. Hence I don't trust any of them. When the merchindise is in my hands, I'll believe 'em. I'll also buy from them again, if they treat me right.
Maybe that's what's missing. 'The customer is always right' I prefer 'We KISS the customer on the behind!'
Shadowwalker Delaforge.
I have had especially good luck with Rebates from Best Buy... they print a separate reciept for you and print a rebate form on the reciept. CompUSA sometimes has Mail-In-Rebates, but they seem to have more Instant Rebates *mmmm Instant Gratification! There have been rebates in the past(about 5 years ago) that I had sent but never got anything back, but all of the rebates I've sent since then I have recieved. Some times its a nice way to get things on the cheap... like Keyboards and CDs.. when the rebate is for the amount paid, the only things that you don't get refunded are the sales tax, Envelope cost, and Stamp cost... to name a few products, the Memorex Keyboard I'm typing on and the one for my wife, the pretty Blue TDK CD-Burner I got for my Wife, Blank CDs, LinkSys NICs, LinkSys Router, Lexar 64MB Compact Flash with USB reader(cause dang my Parallel one was slow). Many rebates stipulate 1 rebate per household, for those, I use my brother's or mother's, or friendly neighbor's address :) It never hurts(much) to take advantage of a good deal, but most of my purchases are made through Pricewatch.com, but Dang that shipping can kill ya when you just need a keyboard, or CDs or a NIC, and who likes waiting? At first glance it may seem silly that, there are products that are free after rebate.. but like any promotion, it attracts people to the store and those people will be exposed to other products, and those people with extra money might just be able to buy the STNG Series DVD Box set or the Robotech Anime collection, or a new video game, or a book, or a CD of a favorite band that you have all of the MP3s of, or a new optical mouse with faster response time so you can get a few more frags. ::sigh:: I need to get a job so I can buy stuff!
1) Rebates serve only to raise cash and artifically boost stock prices (see: iomega ticker: IOMG, circa 1996)
2) They can deny/delay rebates forever for any stupid excuses.
3) Rebates are anti-competitive because of store price-matching policies.
4) The FTC is impotent. How often do false/misleading adv prosecutions happen? Never. There's so many bizes that break laws and the FTC is purposely under-staffed.
But, nothing will ever happen, because the government is run by ex-execs and cronies of big business. Democracy: money holds all the votes.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
At least for small items. Can't say I've bought anything with a big rebate recently.
OfficeMax constantly has rebates on CD blanks, CD-RW drives, and memory. So, all the machines in the house now have at least 512MB RAM ($20 per 256MB after rebate), 48x16x48 or better CD-RW drives ($20 each after rebate), and I've probably gotten at least 1000 CD-R blanks in the last year for a total of $3.70 (the cost of 10 stamps).
This week, they have PC2100 256MB DIMMS for free after rebate (I know, I know, your machine needs faster). The RAM is usually PNY or Kingston -- not top-of-the-line, but not crap, either.
The first thing I do when I get home is mail the rebates. Takes maybe two minutes. And out of probably 20 in the last year, I've gotten every check, no problem. These are a mix of store and manufacturer mail-ins.
I'm getting ready to buy a ham radio transceiver that's got a $200 mail in. I'll let you know how that goes.
No, I don't work for OfficeMax.
I bought a Panasonic digital camcorder for my company (with their money). I told my business manager that Panasonic was also offering a $200 rebate. She said "Great! Fill it out!"
So I did...I got all the required items together, filled out the paper work correctly...and then waited....and waited....and waited....for FOUR months!
Then Panasonic sent me a letter saying we were not elegible for the rebate since it was a company purchase not a personal purchase. WTF? Why should Panasonic care who the hell bought the stupid thing?
Anyway, I now ignore rebate promotions (unless they are the instant-at the register type).
-ted
I bought a hard drive recently from CompUSA. The mail in rebate is $60 IIRC. Of course CompUSA charged me sales tax on the price before rebate, about 7% which is $4.20 on $60. So who gets that $4.20? The government, I doubt it, certainly not me. This seems like an obvious scam and pisses me off. After rebate the hard drive costs me $70 but I've paid sales tax not as a percentage of $70 but as a percantage of $130. I've paid nearly double the sales tax I should have been charged in my mind. It wasn't a manufacturers rebate, I mailed in the rebate form directly to CompUSA. I bet they keep the $4.20 and my $60 rebate really only puts them back $55.80.
I purchased 3 SAMSUNG monitors a year ago based on a $50 rebate for each. well the short of the story is I have never recieved the rebates and bought these monitors at full price. You be the judge.
They're terrible. I will no longer do buying with them (I am the tech director for a school district and spend A LOT of money each year with vendors like Sam's Club and GovConnection) directly because of the "rebate screwing" I have received from them time and time again.
Last week, I "lost" $180 worth of "gift cards" from Office Max. I bought two of their HP LaserJet 1200 printers with $60 gift cards each, only to be told in two form letters that my purchases didn't fall within the "buying window." Although the February monthly rebate book had this rebate prominently listed, there was only ONE DAY in February in which this rebate was good. Office Max LEFT THE REBATE OFFER SIGNS UP on the printer display, although the one day in February had gone by (they were still up a full week after the day had gone by). This is bullshit and is deceptive to buyers.
Around the same time, I bought a $999 HP color laserjet with a $200 rebate, only to be told that the store didn't have any on hand and that they'd have to order one. I specifically asked two different people (four total, after phone people later on) if I would have the printer within two weeks (the deadline for rebate submission) -- everyone said yes. The printer arrived three weeks later. We refused to sign for it when it did finally show up, and it was returned to Office Max in Houston, TX and they ate the shipping both ways on it. Serves them right.
Another rebate from January for $50 I'm still waiting on. I always get receipts via the Post Office that the mail-in was received, so I know my submission got there. Who knows, I guess whenever they decide to send it is when they'll send it.
Sam's Club makes you jump hoops, too, by requiring you to go to the website and "register" your purchase, even though they already know full-well what you bought and what the rebate is. But at least you get it.
The translation of the "rebate" programs into natural language is something like: "We will pay you $30-$50 if you send us your address and get you onto lots of mailing lists. The average cost per customer is probably a few dollars, because most people don't send in their cards. And we actually make money on the sales of address databases. We also believe that we make money by resales to people who we send lots of marketing materials."
I purchased a DirecTivo last year with a DirecTV dish and some other stuff for $390. I bought an open box item from Circuit City. On the price tag for the Tivo unit in huge ass letters it read "Before $100 rebate from Sony". I bought the damned thing, extremely happy with my purchase for a supposed $289. I filled out all the proper forms exactly as Circuit City instructed me, and sent them in with the bar code from the box. 3 months later, I got a note from Sony claiming I had forgotten the bar code.... I was super pissed because I know I sent it in. But, fortunately for me, I saved the Tivo box and it had a second bar code on it! So, I took the letter they sent, included the new bar code, and sent it all back in. That was over a year ago. I have yet to recieve my rebate. Fcsk Sony, fsck Circuit City, and fcsk rebates.
on wheresmyrebate.com you can check on the status of your rebate i've been waiting for mine for probaby about 4 months now, blahhh i want my $30!
In fact, I make a point of it.
If I see two products, similar in quality, and both products cost the same before the rebate, I will buy the one without the rebate offer.
The stores out by me never seem to have up to date rebate offers either. I'd purchased a few things with rebates, and eventually got my money. But it took so freaking long, and was so much trouble, that I decided never to buy anything that offered a rebate again.
Of course, sometimes I buy the 50pack cds that offers a rebate anyway, but only because I was going to buy it anyway. When I see that rebate sign, I get tempted to buy something else instead. I throw out the rebate offer.
I *really* hate rebates.
When I joined Speakeasy.net, they offered a full rebate on the DSL modem. I got the money within a reasonable amount of time (within the time frame that they said it would).
I've bought two Epson Stylus Color 740 printers (one for me, one for the in-laws) and got rebates on both. One of the printers died shortly after it's one-year warranty, but that's another complaint. The rebate worked.
For the past two years, I've done my taxes with TaxCut software. You get a $5 rebate for the Federal program and a full ($25) rebate for one State Program. For both years, I've received the rebates before Tax Day.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
These guys are the best (don't flame me yet). Years ago they were doing a $50 rebate on the latest and greatest office. The real neat thing was instead of just the usual UPC code they accepted the following, from ANY of the products you UPGRADED from.
Top of the box
Front page of the manual
Paper insert from the CD. (didn't specify front or back so I used both.
You had to have a receipt (real tough to make..)
The original rebate coupon (slick paper copied great at kinkos)
So at the big company I worked for they actually bought boxed versions, no license agreement and we kept them in the storage room, TONS of them.
Toughest part was the limit of two per address. Ended sending them to every friend and relative I had. Also tried (and succeeded) by slighty changing my name and street name for multiple receipts at the ole home address. Worked, and redemption time was pretty quick. We called them presents from "Uncle Bill" Odd thing though, about eighteen months later I did start getting random junk mail to those bogus address...
??? Profit.
My big problem with rebates, is that they require you to send in the UPC (sometimes to two places, violating the laws of physics), but if you send in the UPC, you can't return the product to the store if it fails for some reason.
I run into this all the time, because at least half the stuff I buy breaks or fails to operate within specifications within the time alloted by the store for returns (30 days in general). It's a pain to be constantly returning things, but it's even worse if you have to send the UPC to the rebate people in the same time period as the warranty! It's like you are forced to choose one or the other...it's really a gamble.
man tunefs | grep fish
1) A free credit to the producer for 3-6 months
2) Your personal mailing information given to them
3) Usually information about how the thing has been bought, with what else and where - by reading the receipt.
Depending on quality of thing you buy and the
rebate amount it's worth or not to accept the rebate. You are not forced to accept rebate in any way.
But, it probably varies from company to company... maybe Apple's the exception (wouldn't be the only thing).
They print out separate "rebate receipts" and rebate forms at the cash register.
Fry's has started doing this too.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
CompUSA should be called RebateUSA....Everything in the damn store is "price after rebate"
Another thing I don't see people addressing is the topic of tax.
When you buy an item for $1,000 (which includes a $100 rebate), you're actually paying the tax on the $1,000, not on $900.
So, make sure you factor in the tax factor before committing to a rebate sale. Actually better yet, everyone should just boycott any and ALL items with rebates. It's all just a scam. If they wanted to give you the money they would've discounted it at the counter.
eTrade SUCKS
Rebates are a company's way of saying, "We don't really care about you, but we want you to think we're giving you a good deal, and we're pretty sure you're too stupid to know the difference."
If they wanted to lower the price of something, they'd just lower the price. Rebates are almost a slap-in-the-face brazen admission that they think you're an idiot.
So they may likely deny your application for no reason at all, no matter how carefully it is filled out, and how many copies of eveything you send, and THEN honor it if you insist and take it personally.
I used TurboTax for two years, enticed by their rebate offers. Each year they (or, more accurately, the company that processes their rebates) sent me notices saying that one thing or another was wrong with my rebate submittal when I knew damn well that I had fulfilled the terms of the rebate. I eventually got my money out of them, but not until after significant hassle. Those travails, combined with their use of spyware in TurboTax 2002 and their rather dismal and untrustworthy privacy policies have driven me away from their software for good.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I've found a lot of companies are issuing rebates through rebateshq.com now. I've had pretty good luck with them. On one rebate, they insisted I had sent the wrong upc, but I insisted otherwise, and they sent the check anyway.
One reason rebates are necessary is when a manufacturer offers a rebate for items rather than the dealer or reseller. For example, Maxtor wants to reduce the price of some of its drives to move its inventory so it offers a 30$ rebate. You go to Office Depot to purchase this drive. OD cannot give you the 30$ at the register because their cost for the drive has not changed, they still paid a certain amount for it. Therefore you must mail in a form along with proof of puchase to the manufacturer who then gives you the appropriate amount back. Accounting practices would be even worse than they seem now if this type of shifting around of money took place.
A marketing friend at my former company told me that the company doesn't really benefit from the float on the money to be rebated. They contract with a company that processes rebate and they have to pay in advance. Money left in the account gets refunded after the program ends. Thus the fullfillment companies get the benefit of the float, not the vendor. The company I worked for offered rebates primarily to build customer lists.
I've never had a problem with a rebate, it is cool getting a check for 50$ in the mail and not knowing why. Mmmm beer money.
Best experience I had was when I bought my xbox and got the DVD remote and stuff for it with a $30 mail in rebate. They actually called me because they couldn't read my name properly. Properly demographic, but they did call back after 2 weeks to make sure I got the check. Was microsoft but still pretty good
Better link here, yup. Scandalous.
I once fell for a rebate offer from Best Buy in which you could get $30 back from a Western Digital hard drive and $30 back from some overpriced RAM, be only if you bought both. You had to send the memory UPC to one address and the hard drive UPC to another, while copies of the receipts went to both.
Well, I dug out the UPC from my hard drive box, triple checked the forms and receipts, following Best Buys handy "Rebate Receipt" guidelines (why can't the just take care of the rebate for me if they are going to go to this much trouble?). After waiting three months, I got the rebate back from my memory. Another month went by and I still didn't have the rebate from my hard drive back. I mailed and tried to call, with no luck. Then, I finally got back my original rebate letter I sent them, with everything except the UPC. It said that I had sent the wrong UPC. This was quite laughable because there were only two, and I knew that I sent the memory UPC to the correct address because I had already gotten back the rebate. So why didn't they send me back this "wrong UPC" ? I sent the whole thing back to them asking this question, and they sent it back to me again with a letter describing how they have to be strict to prevent fraud. I called and finally got ahold of someone, who gave me a different address to send my letter to. After sending it to this address and waiting a month, I finally got a letter back saying that the deadline for the offer has expired.. have a nice life.
Well, I will never buy anything from Western Digital again. Other than this misfortune, I have never had any problems getting back rebates, other than the absurdly long response times.
I've never had a big problem with rebates. I have had a few that were late, but I use my Palm Pilot to keep track of them without spending too much time thinking about the whole process. I had to call a few times to get some rebates from Kiplinger for TaxCut a couple of years ago, but they made good in the end.
To me it has always been very easy to follow the instructions and get them mailed in right away. Best Buy makes the process very easy by giving you an extra rebate receipt so you don't have to make a copy of the original (or give up the original). I've probably mailed in between 10 and 20 rebates in the past 10 years and for the stuff I've bought it's been a very simple exercise in following instructions.
But my last Best Buy rebate on a Maxtor hard drive has me rethinking my rebate strategy. I read the fine print and it basically said you give them permission to spam your information all over creation. I don't know if that's worth a few bucks to me.
The worst rebates are the ones offered by utility companies for doing energy efficiency upgrades to your home. The application requirements can be impossible. Our water company offered a $100 rebate for switching to a low-flow toilet. We received the offer days after we remodeled a bathroom and switched. However, it required a receipt from a qualified recycling center that shows we dropped off an old toilet. Has anybody out there ever heard of toilet recycling? And wouldn't recycling an old high-flow toilet defeat the water-conservation goal?
We had a similar problem when we replaced 18 windows in our house with energy efficient ones. I should have been able to get hundreds of dollars in rebates, but our contractors threw away all of the certification stickers. They faxed me an illegible copy of the invoice for the windows to use instead, but it was rejected by the rebate folks because it was illegible. The vendor of the windows has no system to reproduce an invoice from their records.
And finally there was the programmable thermostat rebate, which you could only claim if you got a licensed contractor to install it. Yeah, right.
I love rebates. I use them all the time, and have yet to have one go bad. -$100 on a monitor, a free 64Meg flash drive, free cd media, free floppy disks, $20 bucks off a phone, 1/2 off a toaster oven. What's not to like?
Everyone should realize that you need to jump through the hoops that they tell you to if you expect no hassle with your rebate. All you have to do is be able to follow the instructions. It usually takes less than 5 minutes to get the right stuff in the mailbox.
Of course they earn interest with the lag time. So what? The free flash drive was the last thing I got (from Fry's). It is a "$30" device with a $30 rebate. How much interest could I earn on $30 in 6 weeks (without breaking kneecaps)? I'd bet it's not enough to pay for a flash drive. They borrow my $30, and give it back in 6 weeks, in return I have a flash drive that I keep permanently. I wish everything had a rebate.
Buy from any dealer except Apple and you will get ripped off. You get a free 256MB SODIMM but they charge you $48 to install it (the stick costs $50). Refuse the install fee? NO free memory for you.
You get a free Lexmark printer after rebate, but you have to wait months for the rebate, and you had to pay extra for the shipping.
And so it goes.
We just leased 4 iMacs from a vendor who I will not mention but somewhere in the name it says "warehouse." We were to get free extra 512MB on each mac (with install fee), plus 2 free printers (after rebate), 2 $20 printers (after rebate) and 4 free USB floppy drives (again after rebate).
1. Two of the macs came with just 512MB instead of 768MB
2. One of the printers was DOA
3. NO paperwork we could use for the rebates
4. We paid shipping for all the extra crap.
It was a total ripoff.
The only company that has ever paid me on time is Microsoft. Many times I bought Microsoft sidewinders or games with $10-$20 rebates and they always showed up as advertised. Everything else I have tried has been a ripoff.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
But generally I find all the rebates through CompUSA are fine. Some of them are handled through CompUSA itself, but most are handled through the outside manufacturers who make the products you're getting the rebate on. Out of 20 or so rebates I've sent off for (most have been for CD-R media), I've only ever not received 2. That's a pretty good track record ... go CompUSA!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I just recently purchased a Garmin Legend GPS and they have a $50 rebate on it - I sure hope it isn't as bad as the last time I had a rebate for something - my AT&T cable modem service.
... well, I had to go back to AT&T since they are the monoply here in Cambridge (although it was really RoadRunner that got bought up by MediaOne that got bought out by AT&T who then got taken over by Comcast - lovely).
AT&T's deal was "sign-up now and get 3 months free!"
Hot damn, that was a good deal. Granted, they had totally screwed up my billing in the past and as a result, I swore never to use any of their products ever again. I switched to DSL, had far too many problems, and
I could rant for a whole page about all of that, but it isn't about rebates.
So anyway, I sign up, and ask about the 3 months free (being suspicious that I was having to pay an awful lot straight off considering it was "free").
They told me that they would send me 3 (actually, it might have been 6 months free - but either way, what they did still stands) rebate coupons in the mail, and I should hang on to those, and then every other month I should send them in with my bill. These rebates weren't universal "I am your free month of cable" rebates - but actually had a value associated with them that was only good towards the cable bill - I think $80 or so.
So I thought, okay, this is a pain in the ass, I have to remember which months to use these and then not lose them... but cool.
So I setup a reminder on my computer that would pop up every other month to tell me to use them, and I put them in a drawer so I wouldn't lose them, and I was silly with faith in the system.
So what should happen is every month you get a bill, but every other month you send in a rebate coupon with it and you get that month free.
In theory.
What really happened was that the first month was $75. The second month was $95, and the rebate didn't cover all of it. The third month was $150. The fourth month was $98. The fourth month mentioned that there was a billing mishap, and this one was only $40. And it went on like that for over a year - just arbitrary numbers, but always higher on the months that I was to use a rebate coupon.
I called them about it and they said that it was all normal and that I shouldn't worry about it.
Right.
I was only using basic service - it isn't as if I was racking up outside charges beyond just what should have been a standard rate.
At the end of that year I got a notice saying that I was eligible to be part of a class action lawsuit against AT&T for fucked-up billing (oh, if only they had really worded it that way) and that if I wanted, I could sign up to be included - what would I get out of it?
3 months free cable. With rebates. They also said that if I wasn't a current customer, they would waive the setup fee for me. Fantastic - since they always do that anyway - I've never known anyone to pay that setup fee.
I should note that AT&T also fucked up both my cell phone bill and my fiancee's cell phone bills (different occasions and different years). I quit their service and had continued billing issues as part of the closing out process - my fiancee has stayed with them and says they seem to have resolved the billing since and our cable and her cell phone bills are constant now.
AT&T is on my list of companies that are retarded and I avoid using them if that is an option.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
My fiancee is the rebate/refund Nazi!
If she's due a 17 cent refund on a $27,000 purchase, she'll get that refund. Short of sacrificing small animals she'll do whatever it takes to get the refund or rebate requirements satisfied so she can get her money.
Craenor
Also, how to prevent information from being sold ? You can't, but how do you deal with potential SPAM ? Each company gets their own rebate address. Also the only company that really seems to sell information is Staples.
I've gone out now 3 years now, and spent over 1500 and gotten 1200 of it back. (and I DO track my rebates).
What people are probably doing (not doing ?) is following the instructions EXACTLY so of course they get screwed.
The only products I won't buy now are Mad Dog (they keep screwing my rebates claiming a problem).
UPS Sucks
I have the perfect plan. Calculate out exactly the percentage of people that will never return the rebate form. Then figure out the amount you need to multiply the cost of the item if you offer it for free with rebate. Be sure to charge slightly more, and you're bound to come out ahead!
(They still owe me for my $100 optical mouse. Which broke.)
for last x-mas i bought a dvd player for my parents, and amazon had a printable $20 rebate coupon.
I sent in the coupon with the UPC symbol from the box after it arrived. that was a couple months ago. I promptly forgot about it.
yesterday I got a check in the mail. literally, it was a check in the form of a postcard, sans envelope.
So I guess they just sometimes take a while. If I had remembered about the rebate I probably would have been peeved that I hadn't received it yet!
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
1. ALWAYS send traceable mail (UPS, certified, return receipt, etc)
2. Photocopy all forms before sending
3. Follow-up.
Or don't buy anything based on the rebate price.
If you don't think it's a good value at the price before rebate, leave it on the shelf.
Momma says rebates are of the devil!
I hate these things. I only buy products with rebates when the before price is right. I avoid them mostly and think everyone should. The lure of the after price is to get you there. It's almost a bait and switch. But they'll keep doing it as long as it works.
>
Pay with credit card and dispute the charge if you don't have that rebate in 8 weeks. It has worked for me: broken rebate = broken product.
I bought the sprint sanyo cellphone from best last december, which is supposed to come with $100 rebate. Sprint won't take bestbuy's rebate receipt as proof of purchase, even though the guy from bestbuy convinced me it was OK. I sent in a copy of the receipt from bestbuy to Sprint three weeks ago and am still waiting for my 100 bucks.
Last yea I got my $10 rebate for my TDK mp3 player. Took about a month or so. I just sent out 2 more rebates one from d-link the other from Best Buy. Its been about 3 weeks. havent got anything and when i check the d-link rebate tracker it doesnt find anything.
i did get taxcut's stuff back quickly, although it was dumb sending in the box bottom. what was worse is i bought a creative tv tuner card and they wanted the whole bottom of the box (the long skinny one) that pissed me off, had to fold it over and it looked like a letter bomb. it was rejected and i didn't get my 50 bucks. some companies really are dicks about it, however some companies do come through. off the top of my head, kbyte memory has been ok, and linksys has been excellent. i've purchased a dozen products from linksys with rebates and i have gotten them all within a few weeks (not months) but i too am getting to the point that i don't buy many things because of the rebate price. some stuff yes... but lots, no. i think verbatim was another good one, can't remember...
To me, a rebate says "We know this product is overpriced". I also value my own time highly, and so I don't want to waste it on paperwork and queueing at the post office.
I hate rebates so much that I will even buy a slightly more expensive product just to avoid a rebate. I've gone into a store wanting to buy some Brand X CD-Rs, found that they all have rebates attached, and bought Brand Y instead, paying more than the price the Brand X was before the rebate. I know, stupid and pathological, I just really hate companies that cynically attempt to rip me off.
Another real example: for a long time I wanted to get a Lexar USB memory key device. I particularly wanted the Lexar, as it was the smallest on the market. However, I always saw it with a rebate, so I decided to wait until the price dropped and the rebate went away. It didn't--instead, PQI came out with an even smaller USB flash memory device (the "Intelligent Stick"), which was cheaper than the price of the Lexar before rebate. So I bought PQI, and Lexar lost a customer.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
And I've gotten my rebate all but once, which was from Iomega. Iomega got sued over that whole fiasco, of which i was a member of the class. Even so, I've never purchased an Iomega product since, nor will I ever again.
Only other rebate I didn't get was on my E-File last year. H&R Block never sent the code i needed for the form, and asked me to re-request the number from my tax software. Well, the software said "you've already requested your number, we can't do it again" I'm glad to see H&R Block is getting sued over thier refund advance loan scam (>100% interest) suits them right. From now on I use the federal paper forms, and fill them out by hand. Screw the gov't they can pay the extra for handling paper forms while they charge me to "save them money" by efiling. Up thiers.
who process those rebates.. it's boring, anti-productive, destructive to self-respect.. a friend a while back got RSI processing pet-food coupons, spent a year fighting the company about it (couldn't quit).. so if you are gung ho on rebates think about what kinds of occupations you want to create.. in my opinion the rebate world is worse than government beaurocracy -- it doesn't even have a goal (much less a result) of benefiting society
It's way too slow. It's nothing more than a sales tool, obviously. I'd rather spend extra time shopping wise and paying less in the long run instead of getting a good deal on one lousy piece.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
I've never had any issues with rebates.
Rule #1: Make a photocopy otherwise in 3 months, you won't remember where you bought the thing (even less the number to call to inquire!)
Rule #2: Don't buy anything that has a good rebate if you don't need it. For example, you can find a free phone at xyz but the question is: Do you need it? If not, why worry.
Rule #3: Look for a bargain. Sometimes, rebates are given to end of life merchandise, meaning someting new is coming up and they need to get rid of this model. Nothing bad with this, but look at other alternatives (OEM hard disk for example, versus retail box usually has a BIG difference).
I've always used rebated on useful stuff. For example you can always get cheap/free CDR's every other month or so.
Basically, shop wise! Don't get caught in the "boy it's cheap" syndrome if you don't need a "zyx" or whatever...
Don't forget that a rebate is always on the seller's advantage. They profit from interests and then write off this amount for tax purposes.
So basically, it's a win-win situation. Even if you get your rebate, they get to lower their taxes.
-- Leeeter than leet
My rebate experience:
Nokia offered a $50 rebate on a phone I bought in December. I got it sometime in February or March.
Nintendo offered a $25 rebate on purchase of WaveBird and Gamecube, and a $5 rebate on purchase of WaveBird and a game, limit one per household. I received both.
CyberRebate.com used to offer up to 100% rebates on items, until they went out of business.
Here's the Dilbert strip.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Rebates are free money. If you're too lazy to follow through with your part, then don't buy the product. It's really as simple as that.
Companies use rebates for one thing, to make money. Especially for computers, after rebates the products end up being well below cost. They use the origional rebate money to collect interest on short term investments, plus adding in the money they dont pay to people who dont file ends up making the retail store money. If the retail stores took the rebate money off at the register, then they'd have no way to combat the people that just walk in, buy a tower and nothing else, and leave. Trust me, computer retail can lose money very quickly on junkies like us who doesnt need anything other than the basics, and rebates are one way to help curb that. Think about that next time you go in to buy things without any of the extras. Everyone has to make thier money somehow.
There has been an ongoing discussion at fatwallet.com about some dell rebates for a Dimension 8250. It appears that Dell had 5 rebates up for the same computer through their EPP/FSS program (Employees and Education, Faculty groups). Dell later backed out of two of the rebates for most applicants stating that they were for "specific institutions only" even though that appeared nowhere on the rebate. Many people haven't gotten their other rebate checks. It seems to some that they are saying they mailed the checks when they really haven't hoping you won't call or write and request a reissue. The entire thing seems pretty sketchy. It's disapointing to see as respected a company as Dell treating their customers this way. Several customers have filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau or are trying to take their case to small claims court.
Link to Fatwallet Thread
Purchase during the first week of February
Rebate forms filed that same week.
Last Friday, CompU(selesS)A rebate center clerk says that yes, they have my rebate and it is scheduled to be paid on 6/5. They pushed it back because they were really busy.
Oh and Saturday I went to the store on 5th Ave and 37th St. in Manhattan to tell customers about this, but did the management appreciate this? Nooooooooooo. But I had fun.
If it doesn't say instant or in-store it just doesn't count to me, the other thing is the sales tax is paid on gross sales, so the state actualy get more money by stores using rebates than if it were a manufacturer sponsored sale.
I think on most of the junk that's pushed via rebaits anymore, they keep more on reduced warentee claims from people sending in the all important original sales reciept, than they spend in reates anyways. At least Bestbuy prints you an extra reciept on the spot, and are noramly not too bad about returns. I do recall that it's usualy easier to return something and say it's because you just don't like it than to return something that's genuinely broken. once I had to buy a new one and then return the broken one for a refund to get around some return policy once.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What do you have against Mad Dog?
It's the best damn wine two bucks can buy!
I got screwed out of $50 on an Envision monitor rebate. I don't know why they rejected my claim, and I don't have time to pursue it -- considering that it would probably be a waste of time anyway. Next time you see an Envision monitor rebate offer, consider the rebate worthless. The bastards cannot be trusted.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
If I'm at Best Buy and I see a $200 part w/ $20 rebate and a $190 part w/ no rebate I'll take the $190.
Even if it means spending $10 more, it's worth it because there's a 50/50 shot I won't send the rebate in... and then a 50/50 shot that I won't get the rebate... then there's an additional 50/50 shot I won't cash the check until after the "void after 60 days" period...
So there's only a 12.5% chance I'll save $10... but there's a 87.5% chance I'll lose $10.
PS I checked all my facts 23x w/ Matlab.
Costco -- the rebate form is printed on the register receipt. You only need to fill in your address and mail the rebate form. You can check the rebate status online.
Verizon Wireless -- pretty decent too, check if and when they sent you a check.
I am sure other vendors will follow the lead.
ps. I've received a check for every rebate I sent out.
I once got a 50 pak of Optimum brand CDs from Staples and all I had to pay was the tax. The rebate, and the price, were $10. I wished I had had my buddies do the same...
There is a definite correlation between a product's upcoming end of life and a rebate offer. I find that many tech vendors use rebates as a method of discounting their products that are nearing end-of-life to assist retailers in moving out old inventory so that they can bring in the new. With so many replies on this topic, it appears that they are quite successful too.
The manufacturer you must remember as well does not typically have direct financial relations with the retailer, so it would be difficult for them to credit the retailer for their existing inventory. So this is win/win for the manufacturer. As discussed many times above, they are betting on the fact that a certain percentage of people will not make use of the rebate but still purchase the product. A well known manufacturer need not be purposely deceitful in their rebates. In fact, they have done their math otherwise they wouldn't offer them in the first place.
purchased a WD 200gb/8mb from compusa back in january at $350. instant rebate was $50, mail-rebate equaled $100. a drive for $1/gb i could not resist. still waiting for the rebate 4 months later. WD uses www.wheresmyrebate.com... i'm skeered...
Hard work often pays off in time, but laziness always pays off right now.
For me at least. I've sent in rebates for NICs, 2 different routes, and a Wireless Bridge, and gotten them all back. As well I've had luck with D-link (cable modem rebate) and Western Digital, but those two were Best Buy rebates I believe.
Linksys has been good when purchasing online (buy.com) and Best Buy rebates are good too.
The one rebates I've not had work out are K-byte's (RAM people). I got a lot of old PC-133 RAM for some old comps with rebates, and they said my claim was invalid for not having a street address...despite my photocopies showing it being clearly the opposite. But K-byte RAM sucks anyways, so it shouldnt be a problem as you shouldnt be buying them.
Overall, I've gotten back about $200 in rebate money in the past year, and forgotten to send in/been denied (all for invalid reasons) for about $80 worth.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
I've gone through the rebate process with Apple many times. They handle the process through a 3rd party in New Brunswick. They're brutal about filling in all of the information perfectly, and if you don't, you won't find out until you get a letter months later. They only accept information via fax and snail mail, the two slowest, most frustrating ways to do business. And, their response time is months.
It took me 3 months and countless calls to get them to mail me a $19.00 Xserve OS upgrade, that I should have been able to purchase and download online.
I'll pass on the next rebate.
But if you had sent in the rebate, that wine would only be 50 cents.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Late last summer I bought an iBook and an Epson printer from their online store at a time when they had a $100 rebate for a printer purchased with a computer. (Naturally I went with the Stylus 820, a $100 printer -- practically free with this deal!) I sent the stuff in about 2 months after I got the computer and got the check in 2 weeks or so.
Let the buyer beware...
I bought most of my home networking equipment from TigerDirect. They're wonderful, they ship fast and the items arrived in wonderful condition. However, the Belkin products which I ordered had a rebate. I sent in the rebate, 2 months later I recieved an email saying I had not enclosed the UPC. IT WAS STAPLED TO THE REBATE FORM. I attempted to explain this to the support rep, but she wouldn't have it. Obviously, stupid me forgot to photocopy the UPCs. I attempted to ask TigerDirect to clear it up, no such luck.
Needless to say, I don't buy Belkin products from TigerDirect anymore. My girlfriend's home network, which I implemented, is all D-Link now.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Not to be a "me too" kind of guy... I want to make the message crystal clear to any marketing drone that might stumble by a clue.
I *NEVER* consider a rebate.
*EVER*
All that matters is out-the-door price.
If you count on having a rebate to generate a sale to me... you lose.
Sprint offered a $60 rebate on their pcs phones, and I bought two. I might have forgotten about the rebate when the information came in the mail, but a year later I started looking at the old statments to see if it had ever been applied. Nothing....
I called their customer support and they told me that the rebate program had expired. I was prepared to yell but they continued with "so I'll talk to my supervisor and see what we can do". In a minute the supervisor came on the line and promised to get the check in the mail the next day.
In a week I had my check for $120!
Hmmm, lets start with COSTCO. They
mail out their rebates JUNK MAIL
rates. So, they get lost, trashed,
etc. In our case, the checks
(several) took at least
3 months to get here (yes we live
on Maui), and were expired before
they were received!
On thing I haven't seen mentioned is sales Taxes. Unless you live in one of the few states that don't have a sales tax when you buy the product you pay the sales tax on full retail price. However when you get the rebate you are not refunded the amount of the sales tax.
So for example on the $100 dollar rebate I just sent in, I spent an extra $8 dollars on sales taxes.
I guess the state govenments love this.
Am I the only person who really hates the retailers who keep expired rebate offers up on the price listings as long as they can get away with it? Best Buy does this a lot in my area. The price is marked as including a rebate, but you don't find out until you've waited in line and scanned the item that the rebate expired 2 days ago. Do you want to put the item back at the 11th hour? It happens so often, I have a hard time attributing that to incompetence.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
A big motivator for some folks buying laptops and other big ticket items for their small-medium size business is that the purchase price is a tax deduction (and reduces cash on hand at the end of the year), but the rebate is totally off the books.
So that $5000 projector yields not just $1200 in rebates, but a tax free $1200! That makes it equivalent to something like a taxed $1600 worth of income or so.
This exact same thing happened to me with Yamaha. Pretty much word for word. Although the quality of my new burner weighs heavier than how pissed off I got over the rebate. :P
Step 1: Fill it out. It is best to print or type it. If that isn't possible then write neater than you have ever written before in your life. Step 2: Make sure all required information is included. Photocopy everything. Include a one photocopy with the rebate and keep another incase you get a letter saying "you entered the name of your city wrong". You have proof that you didn't or proof that your are a dumbass. Step 3: Check places like RebatesHQ that let you track the status. If the rebate is for a large amount, you can register the letter. I've sent in 5 rebates. The first was denied because my "postal code is incorrect". I think I know my own postal code, anyways...I started including photocopies after that and I have gotten every one since.
I think my single worst experience has been with the entire CD-RW industry. I've been waiting for a $10 Rebate from PNY for about 2 years, and their webpage lists it as "In Progress - You Should Recieve Your rebate in 2-4 Weeks." It has for over a year now.
I think companies like Best Buy are the worst at getting comsumers subjected to this. How often do they show a computer item for an actual sale price. Usually they'll show you that 120gig Special Edition Hard Drive for $99, then in fine print "After $50 Mail-In Rebate". Or those $2.99 100 CD-Spindles that have a $40 mail-in rebate. It assumes you get the right form from them, mail it in, they process it and it doesn't get mucked up in the middle. That's a lot of ifs.
I've gone out now 3 years now, and spent over 1500 and gotten 1200 of it back. (and I DO track my rebates).
So what you're telling us is that over the past 3 years you have *loaned* several companies $1200, interest free.. and don't have a problem with that?
Actually, there is at least ONE easy online rebate system, that used by Sam's Club.
All you have to do after purchase is visit their website, enter some stuff, wait for the stores to update the company database (a day or two), and tell them where to mail the check.
I didn't have to mail anything and actually got a check in less than 30 days. Sweet! This is how rebates SHOULD work.
Compare to Circuit City, with whom I have two outstanding rebates sent in at the end of February. One shows up on their site but says I'm not gonna get a check until freaking May. The other rebate is missing apparently. Jerks.
I did two Staples rebates last fall, both were denied by postcard for no reason. When I called to bitch about, they decided to honor them both "just this one time." I got those checks 8 weeks later. The Fools nailed this one.
Never got back anything. Avoid!
I filled out and sent in a $50 rebate for a GF3 Ti 200 videocard I purchased on Black Friday.
I waited and I realized at about 6.5 months I'd yet to receive the thing.
So I send an email in to the company and ask what is up with it.
I get no reply.
I send another the next week.
Still no reply.
Two days later I get the check in the mail. Seems like a remarkable coincidence to me if it just suddenly arrived more than six months later as soon as I complain.
Bought something on rebate from Best Buy. Sent the forms in the very next day. Get a letter back some months later stating I had purchased the item after the rebate period. Seems Best Buy has a habit of forgetting to tell you the rebate period has expired. Thus, I'm screwed out of some money (about $25 if I remember correctly). BTW, I never set foot inside a Best Buy now. Too many bad experiences that border on criminal fraud in my opinion.
More recently I bought a laptop at Office Depot for my wife. It was on sale and had an additional $150 rebate, making it a very good deal. That evening I realized they didn't give me the rebate form. Went back the next day to get it. They look it up and discover the rebate period had expired. No problem, they immediately credit my card for the $150 without hesitation. THAT is how you gain customer loyalty. Since that day, I have bought all my office supplies from them and the occassional computer item.
-- Will program for bandwidth
But my only real problem with them is the stores habit of putting the prominent shelf price as the price after your rebate which I think is bogus. Its just plain annoying to have to sit there hunting for fine print and looking for after mail in rebate notices to make sure the price your seeing is the one you will actually pay at the register.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
I've read a lot of stories about people getting screwed by rebates, but sometimes the consumer comes out on top.
Many years ago I bought a modem and game together to get a $50 rebate (offered by CompUSA). Basically you got the game for free.
So I made copies of receipts and sent in my rebate and waited.
Months later I still hadn't received my rebate check, so I gave them a call. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing, and each person I talked to gave me different answers, but just about every customer service person I talked to wanted to see proof of receipt, so I probably faxed my receipts to them a dozen times.
More time passed and I'd pretty much given up hope. Then letters starting arriving...
In all I got three rebate checks for $50 each, and several letters explaining why I wasn't getting my rebate check! So in the end I bought a modem and game and got the modem for free!
I've never had a problem with rebates since then. Just unlucky I guess.
Actually, I've been 5 and 0 with Fry's
One of those was even a rebate I didn't know I qualified for, the girl just brought it to me. It was very nice, it had a separate receipt for the rebate, a photocopied page specific to that rebate, and the rebate coupon all stapled together. Of course, I had to undo the staple to read the instructions, but at least it all got home in one bundle.
Seems like a new policy (I visit the one in San Diego by the 8 & 15), though, the other rebates I've had through them weren't this easy. Still got my money, though. Even back when they had 10 packs of CDRs for $20 (waaay back), but with a $20 rebate. I think that was Maxell.
I like rebates because it becomes a question of how valuable your time is. Being just out of college, it's worth my time for just about any amount. I do appreciate those who don't send in the rebates, though - it makes retailers more willing to offer them for the likes of me. I'd consider it akin to a student discount - nothing wrong with that.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I used to work as a temp for some faceless "processing center" that handled claim verification/approval. They told us flat-out that they wanted EVERY form filled out EXCATLY right, and that it be PERFECTLY legible, otherwise the claim be denied.
They even gave us a little checklist for things to look for (ie: 9's that look like 4's, copies of receipts (they wanted the originals), forms filled in pencil or red ink (on the form in fine print it said: only use black or blue ink), etc) and other little technicalities that made it so that the people who sent them in would not get their money.
It really sucked because the forms themselves were from CD spindle packs, and so they were coated with a layer of like wax or plastic or something that made it very difficult for ink to stay on. sometimes people who would write with a ball point pen would leave only the "engraved" writing on the form, because the ink would smudge onto the inside of the envelope, and so those would obviously get put into the DENIED pile.
I guess they were afraid of a class-action lawsuit or something, because forms that had the ink smudged off had to be 'destroyed' and the only record of it was a little slip that had the person's name/address from the envelope they sent it in and the reason why it was denied (illegible) that way, no one (like a lawyer) takes a second look at the forms and says "hey, look! if you angle it just right, you can see what they wrote!"
needless to say, I am now very careful not to commit the same mistakes when I submit rebates!
...that I have tried to collect on. Granted, I have only tried to collect on maybe 4 or 5, some of which were not computer related.
This is a rather common "scam", if it can really be called a scam. You mail your form, the mail room "processes" the form, i.e. - puts it in a bin that says "Do not open until rebate expiration", the company doesn't have to honor the rebate since the expiration has passed... sorry, you lose!
The company, however, now has demographic info that can used/sold/etc.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Manufactures use rebates to help vendors move stock. If they just lowered the price, the delay in the supply chain would stick the vendor with overpriced inventory. Rebates on the older (more expensive stock) help the vendor out of this situation.
...is fundamentally flawed. We as consumers believe that when we pay $100 for an item with a $50 mail-in rebate at the checkout counter, we are actually handing our money to a responsible adult. We delude ourselves into thinking that because the cashier has a GED and a name badge that our money will be treated with care and direction. Herein lies the problem. I equate the "rebate processing center" with the gross motor skills of a toddler and the mental abilities of a 5-year old kindergartener. Please don't mod this up as funny as I am 100% serious. Let me explain.
Responsible, coherent adults would be able to open an envelope without spilling (and losing) the contents. I think you can imagine how 3 small pieces of paper would fare in the hands of a 3-year old. My experience shows that not stapling the receipt and UPC to the rebate form decreases my chances of receiving a check by approximately 50 - 75%. I *always* staple everything together.
A mature, healthy employee would be able to open perhaps hundreds of envelopes a day and input the name and address contained therein to a computer. Any parent of a kindergartener knows that important notes get sent home pinned to the child's back because of the tendency for such easily-distracted hands to part with said notes. I make photocopies of EVERYTHING I send in - the complete rebate form, receipt, UPC, serial numbers, you name it. Usually I do it right at the postal center and I make a note on my copy of when I sent it. This helps some slow-moving rebate centers to suddenly "find" my rebate submission.
A normal, honest adult would always inform me if he intended to default on a loan of any amount. A child's mind is much more likely to forget or dismiss thoughts of repayment. If I have to call someone up to "remind" them of their outstanding debt to me, I consider that more the behavior of an elementary school student than a responsible, helpful employee. Keep a file of your outstanding rebates and don't assume that the folks holding your money are any more responsible than the snot-nosed kid down the street.
I've found that meticulous preparation and documentation on my part, combined with rigorous follow-up has gotten my rebates every time. It helps to have the right mentality and to know who you're dealing with.
I provide customer support for a rebate center.
First, if you're going to apply for a rebate, call the number on the form and make sure everything is correct. Don't assume you're doing it right. The person on the phone will be glad to help you make sure everything is done right.
For the love of god, make photocopies of everything! Rebate form, UPC codes and receipt. Rebates will rarely ask for the original receipt, so don't send in your original! Keep it, because if you want a refund, that's when your original will likely be asked for. Always keep some sort of backup for yourself. The USPS is horribly unreliable. If you can, call the 800 number and as for the street address, not the PO Box, and tell them you want to send it certified mail.
Right after you've bought your product, go to the post office and get an evelope stamped so that you can forget about the cut off date and still be able to qualify.
Read all the fine print. Don't assume anything. Often there's little catches where you need to buy something else in order to fully qualify.
Yes, mark the cut-off date. Also mark on your calendar to call in and check the status after a month. It usually won't take more than a month for a rebate to arrive in the fufillment center and be processed. Verify your mailing information with them to make sure that when it was entered by the datamonkey that everything went in wrong. The unix database that I put stuff into must have triplicate records for every fourth entry, with half of them entered by people who put "Drive" instead of "Dr.", or put an extra digit in your address, or grossly misspelled your last name.
If you're calling in to check status, the Customer Service Rep will love you because it'll be a short call that will keep their call times down.
And for fucks sake, if you DO fuck up and don't send in a UPC code, or are late, the person you speak to on the phone can't change a thing. Speaking to a supervisor isn't going to change anything either. The policies are put in place by senior management, and there is nothing we can do for you. If anything, the supervisor is going to reiterate what the CSR just told you and waste your time.
Hope this helps.
Neutiquam erro
My problem has always been that many of the reate claim processors are using systems that dont fully comply with the recent post office rules wrt the requirement that addresses at "thrid party/non USPS" postal box places must have a certain format for the name and address containing the letters "PMB" in the address. It CANNOT be "suite" or "apt". (# alone or PMB then the number is valid)
Important item to note is that if you dont have the line correct, THE POSTAL SERVICE WILL NOT DELIVER THE MAIL TO THE LOCATION / and even it it makes it to the distributer, they are bound by postal regulations to mark it "return to sender: Must have PMB#"....
This applies not only to rebate places but to any place that sends you bills/checks/payments/etc..
I have seen the problem with mail sent by a well known retailer that every 3-4 months their system drops the PMB from my address and puts APT in there... [they use a system wide mail program to "verify" address correctness... that is supposed to be compliant with the postal system... allows them to get a cheaper rate]. I have called/emailed several times... Last time I sent a message to the postal service to have THEM send the retailer the information....
--
Time is on my side
This is along the same lines of people thinking eBay isn't income and therefore they don't have to pay taxes there either. When even YARD SALES and Flea Market sales a taxable if over $500.
Never want something so bad that you enter into a deal with someone who is deliberatly trying to trick you.
If its real then you can find an equivalent straight for cash deal.
If you have to decide now the answer is "No."
What frame of mind would you have to be in to offer someone the deal being offered you? Do you really want to deal with someone with that frame of mind?(intent to deceive/trick/defraud)
Never buy anything the same day (i.e. sleep on it first; i.e. wait 24 hours). This is the best rule of all in my experience; as I think of things that hadn't occurred to me, I find better deals in that time, I'm offered a better deal by the same guy, or I find I really don't want it so bad after all.
Lastly: remember that rules of thumb are guides, so feel free to break them on rare occations.
Over the past two years, I have filed around $500 in rebate forms.
I have recieved $0 in rebates. I give them their 3-4 months to process, then call back. "We lost it in the mail." "Your claim was denied." "We never recieved your claim." Six different companies gave me one of these three excuses.
Don't even bother. Assume the rebate doesn't exist at all. It isn't worth the time and aggravation. Just buy the product with the cheaper regular price.
I worked at a company that made scanners several years back, and like most high tech firms, they didn't handle their own rebates. They hired a special rebate company to do it. A good number of people just plain fail to mail in their rebate forms, and that's how the rebate folks make their money. The statistic that was quoted to me at the time was that for a 50 dollar rebate, only 50 percent of the people managed to mail their forms in. For a ten dollar rebate, only ten perent of customers mailed their stuff in. I have no idea how true that was, but it seemed to make sense, given the fact that I've never mailed a rebate coupon in at all, for any amount. Rebates are an entirely sleazy practice, but then again, what isn't in big business these days? It's just another example of how corporate america makes people jump through hoops to get basic service, in the hopes that most people will just give up. I just pretend the rebates don't exist, in the hopes that they'll go away. I look only at the price that I'm paying going out the door - if that doesn't work for me, I buy something else. Shawn
However, the end of the page is just hilarous: various inhabitants of Lake Lillian take issue with their "town" being qualified as boondocks. One letter points out that the only llama in "town" is not used for mail deliveries, but rather to keep it's owner's donkey company. They even explain why Lake Lillian cannot be found on a map: it's not about size, but it is a honest oversight by Rand McNally.
And if you're adventurous enough to go to Lake Lillian to collect your rebait cheque in person, be wary of farmboys trying to persuade you to piss into a hedge: DON'T do it! There may be an electric fence hidden inside, it's a popular trick they play on those ignorant "cityslickers"!
I considered buying some rebated items recently, but for several reasons I abstained from doing so. * I haven't applied for a rebate on an item for years, and one of the above reasons makes it clear that things have changed.
... I will never again buy an item on the basis of a rebate until the business climate radically alters.
... so that they will have the two faces of the thing that I am driving at:
a skeptical and educated consumer, and a frugal and demanding consumer.
... so use your other vote, your economic vote, and don't send your money to the criminal overclass.
Reason: What has changed is that rebate schemes are rife with fraud. Worse yet, even if rebate frauds are a fraction of all schemes, they have fatally undermined (informed) consumer confidence in rebates in general. With some research over the last several days, I've seen enough
When I say "fraud", I have a longer and more controversial meaning in mind. "Fraud" means: a corporate planned and executed scheme to wrest more money from the consumer, or to deliver less value to the consumer, through methods that may or may not be illegal but are certainly deceitful and immoral.
As the years have passed, I am finding more and more of this sort of thing. As a consumer, my confidence is very low, and that has only stung the producers. Since it's not much of a sting, I strive to advise and educate the folks around me to see more of these frauds
Fraud is becoming mainstream and that bodes ill for society. It is probably too late to write of this to your legislature
* The other major reason is that I found myself planning on going to the store to get stuff just to get it all for "nothing". After a bit, I stopped myself and reconsidered the wisdom of doing that. It just wasn't right to buy something for nothing, even if it was "freely offered". So, sorry, OfficeMax, but you should go back to selling things like keyboards, spray dusters, telephones and the like for a sensible price.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Live in farm country, no high speed available other than satellite. Go to Computer City to get Satellite Internet Dish DirectTV/PC combo.
Spend $450 for TV/Satellite 1-way Internet combo dish. This includes "free" installation, which later turns out to be a fradulent claim. Note: TV-only dish was $70 at the time. I print out at the store a $50 Computer City rebate (note: not DirecTV rebate) for sending in with UPC, etc. when I get home, which I do.
So I buy the satellite dish with high speed 1-way (high speed download thru satellite, slow upload through phone line.) Installer cannot align dish properly for computer (TV alignment is fine). Installer forgets equipment to test for Internet alignment. Internet install package doesn't install, so can't test that way, either.
Installer charges $115 for "free" installation. See, it appears he had to travel from East Lansing all the way to Ann Arbor to install it, a trip of 90 miles. "Free" installation is only 50 miles or less or something. Hence fraud in the claims by Computer City.
Even though I have Win 98, second edition (which is the minimum OS on the installer), the AOL installer (7.0.something) chokes, and it crashes and tries to install two copies of the USB Satellite Receiver adapter and two copies of the TCP/IP->USB Satellite Receiver. Several phone conversations have no clue. One tells me Hughs (maker of the system) will contact me, which they never do.
As a programmer, I delve in head first, and try various combinations to merge the two versions of the install, deleting one, then the other, trying to see which ones had which correct half of the installation. After several days, finally get a combo that works.
Dish, not properly aligned for Satellite, I have to adjust myself, which is very difficult. Success.
I have to push the dish with a pole from time to time because it is sensitively aligned. Installer never comes back out in spite of his promise and several calls, which he tells me he will do when he is "in the neighborhood", which he is from time to time for other installs.
After a number of months, my computer goes haywire, so I have to reinstall Win 98 second edition. This time, no matter what I try, I cannot get the AOL install to work properly. The double install of the adapter and the TCP/IP->adapter occur again, but no combination (including the one that worked previously) of merging and deleting works. The USB light on the satellite modem keeps blinking, meaning no USB network lock. This is strange since the AOL install triggers a hardware detection that successfully detects the device. Then AOL install crashes and it refuses to go any further. I cannot use AOL 8.0 because that doesn't work with satellite internet, yet I only have AOL as an option for satellite internet. The last and final release of AOL 7.0.x is the one I use, and it crashes on satellite install.
After a month, I get a letter from Computer City saying I missed something or other when sending in the rebate. NO $50 FOR YOU! I double check the stuff I sent in, having made a photocopy of it for just this reason, and I have properly sent in everything.
So, to sum up, I got about 8 months of flakey service and heartache out of a $400 system that actually cost me $400 + $50 (NO REBATE 4U!) + $115 ("free" installation) = $565.
A TV-only dish was $70, giving me an overpayment of $495. Given I also paid about $50/mo for the AOL satellite service, that comes to $50/mo + ($495 / 8 = $62) = $110/month average bill for that 8 month period for flakey high speed service.
Needless to say, after three damned months without the service, I cancelled it. AOL graciously gave me 2 free months of "BYOA" access to compensate, a $23 value! (or $20 or $28, I can never be sure.)
If anyone knows what could be going wrong (yes, AOL's crashing installer is inexcusable) then please let me know. I have no soul and would crawl back, but they just don't want my money that badly, I guess.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
I do not buy anything with rebates. I'm living in the Netherlands, and typically, I have to contact companies abroad (mostly USA), and that is just too much hazzle (if possibly at all). Actually, debates are a clear indication for me that I will pay too much for a product, so it has in fact some use for me: they act as a big warning sticker: "Do not buy. Too expensive".
Nothing is more f'n annoying then buying my Dell Laptop directly from Dell and having to fill out rebate information and send it back in and waiting 6-8 weeks hoping that I did everything from filling out the forms to sacrificing the lamb properly.
In fact, not only do I not bother, but I tend to avoid shopping in stores that use them as a selling point, like FutureShop. A horrible Canadian chain with know-nothing droids (for the most part). Every single sale at this point is really just a mail-in rebate, or an in store rebate or both.
And they always try this Extended Warranty scam. I buy a 70$ dimm and they'd try to sell me a 5 dollar extended warranty. Have I ever had a dimm, simm, etc., die after the original product warranty has failed? Once, but that was a power surge, and the chances that these fucks would honour the warranty are exactly zero.
The best way to fight back against this kind of shit is to not buy from these stores (the savings without the rebate that never comes are usually less than what you can get elsewhere anyway) and to let them know, every time you don't buy something from them, the reason why you didn't purchase the product from them. They had an NEC 1700NX flat panel display on sale this week but without the 50$ rebate it wasn't that great a deal and so I bought elsewhere (a Dell UltraSharp 1800 for 799$ Canadian, FWIW). And I let them know it. I do the same for another chain here called CompuSmart, although they are somewhat less evil than FutureShop.
Buy elsewhere, let them know why. It only takes a couple minutes to send an email once in a while to remind them that they are losing sales because of their bullshit policies.
:wq
I'ved averaged about 4 or 5 rebates a year since the advent of windows 95
I got them all.
They took awhile...but I got them.
Well, its not exactly a computer company. But Rite-Aid's system is near ideal and technologically excellent.
They took the All-In-One rebate a step further and made the entire process online - no mailing involved on the customer side.
To redeem you create a login account at http://riteaid.rebateplus.com/. Then enter certain receipt numbers to their online system (Store #, Receipt ID, Date) and assuming they have gotten the data dump from the store register you can see instantly the details. No bar codes, no rebate forms, nothing, just a couple details off of the receipt. The only downsides is that it is "monthly" single check (to save them postage) and that they probably have data mining all over the place to build a customer information database.
The monthly single check means you need to wait until the last receipt for a particular month to redeem your rebate, unless of course you only purchase once a month. And you only have until one week after the month ends to request the check, so they still have people that forget to do this in time.
The say that you should receive your check within 2-3 weeks after submission. They do not have a way to track the status of your submission though.
There is also the option to mail in a form for those without an computer/internet connection.
Once I saw a mail-in rebate for $0.25 in a auto parts store. It was few years ago, when the postage was $0.29!
Some people have to receive their mail via a P.O. box, they may not have a choice about it. They may live in a rural area or other place where mail is not delivered to their home.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So what you're telling us is that over the past 3 years you have *loaned* several companies $1200, interest free.. and don't have a problem with that?
No. I think he was trying to say, in return for loaning those companies $1200, he has received discounts on goods and services.
Just suppose that he spent all of his money in year 1, and he could get a rate of 4.00% a month on this money, had he kept it:
Nominal Rate of Return: 4.00%
Investment Duration (Years): 3 years
Compounding Frequency: Monthly
Compounded Rate of Return: 12.73%
$1200 * 12.73% = $152.76 opportunity cost.
He obviously thought that $152.76 + $1500-$1200 = $452.76, was worth $1500 worth of goods and services.
Perhaps someone could explain why this is tolerated [by consumers], but it does seem rather strange indeed.
Either it's "In order to purchase something here, you need to give us a $200 loan for 3 months" (the exact opposite of interest-free-credit, which is what most shops use)
Or, it's "Here's a computer for $1200, and by the way, we're lying about that price" which should certainly have the retailer shut-down by trading standards. The evidence in this article certainly indicates that they have little intention of paying this money back (what's the interest rate on a borrower who defaults on 30% of loans?)
If an advert says $1200 (inc rebate), I think the correct reponse should be " you can fsck off, and I'll choose a more reputable place to buy ". Does that sound reasonable to anyone?
I'm still waiting on a 100.00 USD rebate on a hdd. Only rebates I've done are:
MAG 19 inch - $ 80.00 (receceived)
DLINK hub - $ 10.00 (not received)
Pacific Digital CDRW - $ 60.00 (not received)
Motorola Surfboard (cable)- $ 99.00 (received, long time)
Maxtor HDD - $150.00 (sent in a few weeks ago)
-DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Most of my purchases are from OfficeMax, BestBuy,CircuitCity, CompuUSA. Not even a single mail-in-rebate I missed. I will always get my rebates at the max of 8 weeks. So far I never contacted them to find the status of the rebate. Once, when I missed the bar code, CircuitCity even took the trouble of requesting me for the barcode. Once I sent it, it processed the rebate and sent me the check. I don't know which other vendors offer the mail in rebates...but these are absolutely sincere in processing the rebates.
Yeah, our beloved TIVO is a culprit also. In our household we bought 3 new TIVOs, and carefully filled out the forms and submitted EXACTLY what they required. A few weeks later we got a post card (for each TIVO) saying something was missing. If I hadn't photocopied everything, I might have given them the benefit of the doubt.
Other than this rebate scam, I love my TIVO.
I'll bet there are others out there that experienced the same thing.
I'm going to start a credit card company (you all need to apply).
Basically, the way my CC company works is that the register processes it as valid, but when the store (e.g. Best Buy) tries to collect the money for purchase X, I simply send them an "rebate" form* requesting that they fill out five simple lines to get their cash for your purchase.
*All lines must be filled out correctly, including name of company, address of company, CEO's dog's name, and maiden name of great great grand mother. Offer not valid in UT, VT, or any other state abbreviation that ends in T. Side effects, while common in only 48% of patients may include nausea, dizinness, and rectal bleeding.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I filled out a Umax rebate for a scanner, I paid $150 before a $50 rebate. I had checked up on it with no reply. I had forgotten about it, but noticed the price of the scanner drop to $100 before rebate, then $70 (there was a $20 rebate on top of that), and then $50. So a check rolls in the mail, I'm thinking "wtf are they sending me a check for?". It's my rebate check. From two years earlier. ...and the scanner sucked, I traded it for a dead motherboard.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Generally they're a huge pain in the ass, and I try to avoid them, but I've only been denied a rebate once, for an SMC Router. I got some letter stating I bought it from an unapproved source or something to that effect, even though the store (buy.com maybe?) was clearly listed on the rebate form. I then barraged SMC, the store, and the rebate processing address with a series of angry letters. Several weeks later, the check arrived. (I should note this was a significant rebate -- $50 or more? For $5-10 I probably wouldn't have bothered.)
I also once nearly gave up on a d-link rebate, but it too materialized, just a month later than the other rebates I sent in at the same time.
anyway, YMMV...
Often, rebates require you to cut off the UPC code from whatever it is you purchased and send that along with your info. Problem is, many places won't accept returns on items if the UPC is missing, so you're stuck-- get the rebate and hope that nothing goes wrong, or don't get the rebate in case you need to return it.
Never ever ever buy anything at CompUSA that has a rebate, I have been burned twice by them. Rebates are normally fulfilled by a Rebate Firm that does rebates for many companies, and their common trick it to say that you did not provide all the information required, or the rebate was for model number 12345-122a not 12345-122b, or they will pretend they never recieved it. Your best bet to send the rebate certified and return reciept, and photocopy all material sent with the form. That way they cannot deny.
I have found Dell to be one of the worst when it comes to rebates. I have over $1,400 in unpaid rebates with Dell (we do a lot of business with them) all filled out correctly, etc. Of that $1,400+, all of it is over 180 days out. HP has been the best that I have dealt with. Any more I just ignore the rebates and compare prices based on the price paid rather than the price paid minus applicable rebates.
My first ever post WOO HOO! =) Ok, I have been using rebates for many many years. I have about a 99% success rate. The only one I lost was a $50 rebate for a tape drive. When I called about it, it sounded like two guys running a business out of their garage. They claim it was lost of course. Ok, So I use to just throw everything in an envelope and send it on its way. That was back when I had only 1 or 2 pending rebates. Then, after the tape drive ordeal, I started keeping copies. Actually had to call a few companies when I didn't get a rebate. It's funny, every time I ever had to call they ALWAYS said the check was ALREADY mailed and I did recieved the check within two to three days of calling (and the postmark date was the day or day after I called). Then the rebates got too many to deal with manually. So I set up an asset account with Quicken to track exactly how much $$ I was owed in rebates. It also allowed to to quickly see which rebates were overdue. So now I have a pretty good system. I scan everything I send. Everything is taped to one sheet of paper with annotations indicating all the requirements. It's been pretty good. Now the rules have changed. I got some pretty substantial rebates from CompUSA and some pretty small ones. I glanced at a random rebate for that I received and everything looked normal. Then a few days later I went to fill them all out. The BIG rebates ($70, $100) had a requirement that the prbate be postmaked the NEXT DAY (that is about 4 days from when I purchased the items!!!). The smaller rebates were the normal 'postmarked within 30 days of purchase'. The big ones were withing the SAME WEEK!! Not many people rush home to fill out their rebates. They want to play with their new router or hard drive (which may take 4 days for some people). So, yet another way for the companies to deny your rebate. What's next 'Must be postmarked on a Monday before noon or Thusday after the post office is closed'.
I have never had a problem with rebates, myself. I always take advantage of them, whether it is only for $1 or up to $400. Futureshop, and Staples seem to have the best program for checking your rebate status. You can check it easily online within a few short weeks. It's wonderful.
My best ever rebate was when I lived in the UK. Hoover had a deal where you could get a free round trip plane ticket to NY or FL if you bought a vacuum cleaner. Since the cost of the vacuum was far less than the cost of a plane ticket it was a no brainer. Unfortunately everyone else thought so too, and there was a run on vacuums, followed by layoffs at the Hoover plant when demand plummeted at the end of the promotion. Also, they had screwed up when contracting with the travel agent handling the bookings; instead of the large agency they'd intended, they signed up with a small agency with a similar name who couldn't handle the flood of mail. There was huge bad publicity and in the end only people who had sent by certified mail (like me) got their tickets. It's a textbook case of how to screw up a promotion royally, and the person responsible was fired.
Western Digital honored a $80 rebate on a hard disk I bought at Micro Center. No trouble.
Cendyne/Verbatim failed to honor a $50 rebate on a DVD writer I bought at Micro Center. I bought it within the listed period and filled everything out, but allegedly I was several days late mailing it.
I'll never buy Cendyne again.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I sent a &20.00 rebate to Best Buy...never received it. I called and they stated I never sent the upc code from the box. Liars....Kiss that rebate GOODBYE!!!
Also, many larger rebates require the original recipt and a section to be cut out of the box. That makes collecting the rebate for something you are giving away difficult. Do you rudely give the person the recipt ( with the price ) or do you rudely cut up their box so they can't return it if they need to?
I got cheezed out of a $25.00 cell phone rebate that way.
I get pissed at trick finance like that. They should just quote the price and sell it simply. I have become so paranoid that I'm getting bamboozled by not having a calculator to compare prices that I'm starting to just buy the product with the simplest to understand price sticker without trying to figure out how/if the other brand is trying to screw me.
Probably the worst confusion is on big ticket items like cars. They have a rebate so that people who can't put money down on a car can just put the rebate down on the car which allows them to sell more cars. Basically, it ammounts to this: Bank doesn't want to give a low interest loan without a hefty down payment that will let the owner not be upside down on the loan once they drive off the lot. Bank would give the person ( with good credit but no downpayment ) a loan at a higher interest rate, but the customer would rather just wait till they have the money for a down payment than accept a 17% interest rate. But since the car company is also a bank, they offer to apply the rebate (made possible by jacking up the price of the car in the first place) to the downpayment. The rebate is approximately equal (or maybe a little more than ) the ammount of the added interest over the life of the loan. Since the sticker price of the car is more than the true cash value of the car ( even before it has been
driven off the lot because the price has been jacked up to make room for a rebate, the customer is even more upside down on their loan than they would have been if they had been able to buy at the after rebate price without a downpayment.
Eat at Joe's.
I know it's ironic, but I find Microsoft's rebate program to be quite trustworthy. Never failed. I usually get my check in less than 60 days.
:-)
Yes, I buy hardware from Microsoft. They shouldn't be judged only by their software. It's a good hardware company.
The ammount of the sale is higher for a rebate too so you have to pay sales tax on the ammount of the rebate.
Eat at Joe's.
Lost $150 on a cellular phone rebate. Sent all the documents in immediately and EXACTLY as requested. Still waiting for my rebate after a year.
Think about it though: What incentive do they have to be honest and pay you after they have received all that money from you. And if they were REALLY interested in offering you that savings, they would do so on the spot.
Don't fall for the advertising. Rebates are almost always a rip-off.
Why is that a Dell a company that makes and sells it's own PC makes buyers mail in a rebate? They are the only one selling their products, if i call or go to the web, i am dealing directly w/them, so why in gods name should i have to mail in a rebate? shouldnt it be instant? If a pc bundle is advertised by the "interns" as being for $899, then i call or visit the webiste and i learn the cost is more like $1099 (have to mail in a rebate yknow), thats damn near a bait and switch scheme. This same theory wouldnt apply for other products because the manufacturer offering the rebate is responsible for payment and that is not often transacted through the reseller. But Dell has no excuse, they are the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party in this scam.
I bought a $1800 Sony LCD projector from a reputable mail-order place and donated it to my church. Advertised was a rebate for a $300 replacement bulb. So I got the bulb. I downloaded the rebate form and it wanted the original UPC. There is no UPC on the mail-order shipping box (just a brown box). So I'm out $300. That sucks... it is total B.S.!
Do people who hate rebates fail to smile about their tax refunds?
And you should, too. The tax refund means that you had too much money taken out of your check throughout the year. You are simply giving the gov't an interest free loan.
The ideal situation is to owe 99 cents. That way you have the minimum amout taken out of your paycheck without the hassle of having to send the IRS a check. If you owe less than a dollar, you don't have to send that money in.
One year, I owed 93 cents.
What people are probably doing (not doing ?) is following the instructions EXACTLY so of course they get screwed.
not in the least - it's in their best interest to not pay your rebate, through whatever shady yet legal means possible.
1> 'never recieved'
combat w/ registered mail [ a rebate to amazon sent registered still said they never got it, I resubmitted with a copy of the reg. mail reciept, and oddly enough they were quite fast about paying it then]
2> 'missing blah'
bullshit - I had a rebate for Sotec who claimed they never recieved the original upc, they said they couldn't get the product number. I told them I sent in the only thing that could possibly be it, and could they please explain to me what they thought the product number would look like. THEY COULDN'T TELL ME. They didn't even know what it was supposed to look like, but it wasn't the upc I sent in. The UPC which, coincidentally, i used as source for the required product number mail-in just-pay-shipping 32mb usb hard drive right on their goddamn website.
3> "we're not dicks"
best buy paid my $200 'MIR ON ALL NOTEBOOKS' just like they said they would, at about 8 weeks. I'm fine with that, that was the agreement - and I had held up my end of things. Even without the rebate it was a fair price for the notebook, but with it - it was killer - so everyone's happy.
bottom line - if it's a $10 rebate, don't count it towards the price - you're not going to send it registered mail, don't kid yourself [still, I've gotten every $10 rebate I've ever sent in, guess they figure it's not so much money to waste time listening to complaints]. If it's $20 or more, subtract the $5 for copies and registered mail, and then make sure you do it.
I'm still waiting on the re-reply from Sotec though.... time to bust some heads methinks.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Didn't we see this in the March 18 Dilbert strip? http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20030318.html
signature pending slashdot approval
In the rural community I live in California street delivery is uncommon (Post Office does not want to contract out for the long winding and sometimes dirt, mud or snow covered road deliveries). So Most of the rebates that require a street address "no post office boxes" make them a moot point for me and fellow rural consumers.
The second scam is the free internet service thing, also a bust out here, were one would have to call long distance to a larger city to get access to such services (no to mention being a prime candidate for targeted marketing).
So I shop with the pre-rebate price in mind, If I get a rebate, lucky me, but I know I can't count on one.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It was in the form of a post card, one of those little 4" x 5" junk mail kind of post cards that did *not* look like a check and it almost got tossed out with the rest of the junk mail.
That is the *only* rebate I've ever received from the numerous ones I've sent out. I wonder how many other postcard checks I might have received that just ended up in the trash because they didn't look like a rebate...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
One of the fastest rebates I ever got was from Microsoft for some wireless gear.
At least they're good at something.
...bad to make a customer wait for money so the company can make a profit on the interest. Oh well.
Microsoft sidewinder rebate ($20) - received 2 mo
MSN/BestBuy new pc rebate ($100) - received 3 mo
Canon/Bestbuy rebate ($80) - received 1 mo
TDK CDRs / CompUSA rebate ($10) - received 2 mo
CellPhone rebate (nokia?) ($50) - received 1 mo
Overall, I think I might have missed one with a Epson Printer for $30, but that's about all. Maybe a class-action lawsuit would be in order for the biggest Fortune 500 offender if there was a centrally-located tracking system.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
These experiences parallel my own, except Best Buy was even more duplicitous in my case.
The irony of my bad rebate story is that I actually got my rebate on time. The problem was the company that issued the rebate accidentally sent two checks out for every rebate they were processing. As the checks didn't say what they were for (and I was expecting several), I promptly cashed them both.
A couple of days later, I got a letter saying not to cash the second check. Turns out that the company stopped payment on the duplicate checks. *I* got charged a whopping $20 for cashing a bad check (which was only for $5). I'm sure the company also paid more than $5 to stop the check. So the only people that got anything out of this scandal were the banks that collected all the fees.
I have never had a problem with rebates. Either you're all doing something terribly wrong, or you just don't know how to be patient (remember 150 baud modems?). Christmas rebates take longer to come back because there are so many people claiming them. It's almost the end of April and I just got a $20 rebate last week. Sure that's a very small rebate, but it finally came. Stop sitting behind your computers firing away e-mails all day at some company who doesn't care one way or the other, and do something else with your time (even if it is spent entirely behind your computer).
I've sent in dozens of rebates and have never not gotten one. I keep track of them in a spreadsheet so I'd know if one doesn't show up. I've never had to inquire about one, either. It probably helps that I don't buy rebate items from companies that I've never heard of. Personally, I'd be happy if they'd just drop the prices, but the rest of you schmucks who forget to send the rebates in keep encouraging them.
Same thing kind of happened to me. But instead of getting a $50 rebate, I only got $30.
Call up the rebate number. If you don't have it, pretty much any customer service number will do, since they will have the number. When you finally get through the rebate people, explain your situation. If talking nicely doesn't work, give em hell. Usually, the solution entails sending in another copy of the the UPC.
For the two times I've used the rebate, I've always had to send in a second copy of the UPC symbol, because the first one has gotten misplaced.
Wow, you must really hate banks, huh? They keep my money and--get this--MAKE interest off it! Geez, it's just not worth the conveinence of that ATM card anymore!
Rebates basically do not exist for them. The Price is what it is. When I was younger though the would let me convince them to buy the rebated items if it was a better price and then let me fill out the form and collect the money (which I got to keep). It was a nice addition to my spending money and provides a nice precursor to dealing with bills. Ie fill out the things correctly, do it on time, keep track of the amounts.
;)
If and When I have old enough kids I plan on never filling out another rebate form again. It will become part of their chores.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
Whereas I estimate that the time I spend dealing with such trivia is worth more to me than the possible rebate.
:)
Therefore, I never factor in rebates. As a previous poster advised - if it's not worth it at full price, don't buy it.
Has anyone else noticed that rebates are often offered on lower quality items?
That's another reason I don't usually go for them.
Besides - I'm Australian living in the US. I just don't get the rebate culture.
Well, this isn't exactly about a rebate, but... I bought a Sony VAIO at Best Buy, and I dropped an extra $200 on the extended warranty. I took care to make sure it would cover service even if I was overseas. Well, a year or so later the keyboard died and I called the number on the warranty card. They referred me to a different company that would actually handle the claim, where I was told to just get the work done, then submit the claim. I did, and I submitted the paperwork according to their instructions. That was a year ago. After a number of calls and various bogus excuses, I still haven't received payment. So moral of the story: Don't buy the extended warranty, it's a scam. Second moral: find a more reputable place to buy a computer than Best Buy.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Please tell me where I can get a guaranteed return of 4% on my money. My corporate treasurer would like to know too.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I sent in a rebate for my Logitech MX700 mouse over three months ago and never got it. Cheap bastards.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Dare you call That Which Must Be Consumed Cold a wine?
Oh wow, what amazing insight. PLEASE tell me where you can buy all that equipment flat-out for $300... What, you can't? Then you didn't loan anyone any freakin' money, duh.
The other large rebate processing place is home business and "stuffing moms"
You are just full of rumormongering and misinformation. While partially true that there is little incentive to process the rebates and number go "falsely" unclaimed, it is by FAR not the majority of them.
I do agree rebates are somewhat a scam, but not in the mythical porportions you speak of.
I received my rebate from dell within 2 weeks. Not a single problem either. They just e-mailed me and said, "your rebate is on the way."
Of course, that is the first time that's ever happened. Usually 4-6 months for other companies.
Daniel
It takes about a minute to fill in the rebate form and mail it. Add to that the way my wife wields coupons like a weapon, and the savings can become impressive.
I've always been of the opinion that advertising the price including the subtracted rebate amount is false advertising and a deceptive trade practice. The advertised price should be the price you have to pay to leave the store with the item without being arrested for theft. I realize they say "after $x mail-in rebate" but it's still deceptive in my opinion. It's like having a 365 day a year "sale" year after year. Advertising a false price (not what you pay when you go to the store to buy it is "false") is deceptive. They can advertise the "real" price and say "oh and you also get to take an additional $x off with a mail-in rebate" ... as long as the real price is the one in big, bold "look at our super-dooper price!" letters. In other words, the asterisk can say "plus mail in rebate!" but not "after mail in rebate."
Write your congressfucker to have your state's DTPA modified to cover this bullshit.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Actually, my BEST rebate experience was with Microsoft. I bought a Microsoft optical mouse from CompUSA that had a $10 mail in rebate. When I finally sat down to send in the rebate, I realized I threw out the piece of paper that had the address. Undaunted, I mailed the rebate to "1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA" which is the address of their corporate headquarters.
I figured I had a pretty slim chance of actually getting my rebate check, since this probably wasn't the right address. To my surprise, about 4 weeks later, I received a nice, shiny new $10 rebate check! While Microsoft doesn't do everything right, their rebate fulfillment department gets my highest praise.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
Once you've hunted down the information, filled out the card, and sent it in, you can expect a long wait - at best. They want that money in their bank as long as possible.
Many of the companies running rebates seem to have a problem in tracking them. We've all either experienced it, or heard stories from friends, about calling months after sending the rebate form in and being told "We have no record of it." Of course not - why would scam artists keep records that said they owed us money?
Even in the few occassions where you get your money back, you've saved a little money, but you've gone to a lot of trouble, and you've given them your name, address, phone #, email address, etc. Marketers must think that's a great thing. But for those of us who are tired of telemarketers, junk mail, and spam, it sucks.
I quit buying anything based on a rebate a couple of years ago. I'm convinced that any company who uses that form of marketing is essentially dishonest, and I'd prefer to do business with honest companies.
Surprisingly, the one company I've gotten a rebate from was... Microsoft! Yeah, I sent in the rebate for a joystick, sure enough it came back a few weeks later.
I've sent in a couple of others too, but never heard back. Never really cared to track them down either.
Hey, I had this *EXACT SAME THING* happen to me from Mad Dog Multimedia. I did follow the form exactly and they said I didn't.
Now I see other people are also suffering this. I think it is time for a class action suit.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Just because you can't buy equipment elswhere at a cheaper price, doesn't mean you haven't given them a loan. Anytime you give someone money they are expected to pay back, it's a loan.
Mouse before rebate $20 after rebate FREE.
VS
Mouse with no rebate offer $7.
I'll take the $7 mouse. Come on why rebate to zero unless you know most people won't bother?
The reason anyone dose this is for marketing data and they also expect most people to not bother as a result they'll actually make more money selling overpriced "discount" items than they would if they sold streight forward.
Some occasions the business won't process the rebate. Your screwed... HAHA.
Some times the business folds before your rebate is approved.
Isn't that a stinker? What is that anyway. Approving your rebate? What for? You mean they get at whim to NOT send it? Dam stright thats what it means.
Don't you feel specal?
When I got my last dial up modem (about 5 years ago...) the old 28.8 k bauds were actually MORE than the 56k bauds why? A rebate... of course I priced BEFORE rebate and the 28.8s were cheaper that way and thats what I got.
Even with my wireless PDA. I could buy the modem outright and then get a rebate or have the wireless provider ship it to me for free. You know I didn't go for the rebate THAT time..
(I had to agree to one year service eather way... and this way I'm not paying for it)
I don't actually exist.
I am one of those people who almost always gets my rebate, although I agree that the #1 thing you have to do is call about it when it is past the due date. And, you MUST make copies of EVERYTHING you send. Also, save a copy of the store ad showing the offer on the item, especially if you think there's any chance the store is promising more than what the rebate fulfillment center will deliver.
Now once in a blue moon, I've had a company try to deny a rebate for some reason. For example, once on a CD-R they tried to tell me I had not sent the UPC (I had a scanned copy of the UPC I had cut out of the box). This was on a name-brand CD-R from a large chain office supply store and I was talking to the chain's rebate center. I said, "I have a copy of everything I mailed in, including the UPC. I would be happy to send you a copy but you should realize that if I do, I'll also be sending a copy to my state's attorney general's office, naming the store in my complaint. (Please note they had already denied my rebate, I would not do that if they simply requested a copy of the submission, but at that point they were trying to stonewall me). So the person on the other end put me on hold for a moment, came back and said, "Mr. *****, we see by your records that you are a good customer of [the office supply chain] so we will go ahead and process your rebate."
If a rebate center denies the claim and can't be budged, I go back to the store with copies in hand and ask the manager to pay the rebate (usually they will if you either have a denial postcard, or it's been about six months and all you've gotten is the runaround - but there may been a reason for that which is peculiar to my state, which I will get to in a moment). Of course certain stores may not be willing to do this, but others are.
By the way, those online rebate forms that some companies are starting to use protect YOU against spelling errors in your name or address. I know it's easier to fill out the paper coupon, but when you do it online they have NO excuse for getting your name or address wrong.
One other thing to think about. If you are deaf, you may not have a voice telephone. If you live in a shared living situation, you may not have a phone of your own. In either case, you *usually* can note that on the form where they ask for a phone number. It is not a requirement to have a telephone in order to get a rebate, unless it says that it is on the form. If you leave the "Phone Number" line blank, that is an incomplete form and they may reject it for that reason. But if you are deaf and put "deaf - no voice telephone", or if you are living with someone else, have no phone of your own and simply put down "no phone", you have put something on that line and now your form is not incomplete. If you have doubts (and are in the latter situation), call the toll-free number on the form and ask what to put on the line if you have no phone - usually they will tell you that "no phone" is fine (of course you should do that BEFORE you cut out the UPC).
(Which reminds me, always make cutting out the UPC the LAST thing you do, that way if the rebate is screwed up in some way you will know while you can still return the item. I have returned items once or twice in the past simply because the rebate form was too ambiguous or complicated to complete).
Now, here is part of why I think I do so well. For one thing I have the persistence of a bulldog once the rebate is about a month overdue - I call back at least every 30 days and I don't take "no" for an answer (you tell me I won't get my rebate and both you and the store will be named in a complaint to my state attorney general).
The other thing is that I live in a state where the attorney general's office takes consumer protection seriously. They have an online complaint form which makes filing a complaint easy, and they do follow up on such complaints, and they do fine businesses that are repeat violators (and it isn't just a slap on the wrist, either). So any time I've
You can call me crazy if you like, but I don't just consider the rebate to be nonexistent, I actually avoid purchasing any product which has an associated rebate. I don't like putting up with the half truths and bullshit, and I don't like the vendors thinking this is a reasonable tactic, so I don't buy products pushed in this way.
This attitude is informed by a life of no rebates ever being honored by any vendor at any time. Though I've only tried 10 or so in my life, so I guess that's a bit of a broad conclusion, I'm not willing to put up with the harangue.
-josh
WINE?? I hope you're talking about WINE 3.0, the two bucks can go for the CDs it was burnt onto. MD 20/20 is pretty good for cheap LIKA'!
One day he went grocery shopping and bought a particular brand of coffee simply becasue it had a rebate of $2.00 or something...something so insignificant I wouldn't have bothered.
Well, my dad took the coffee home and reviewed the reabte form. It asked for the usual contact information (name, address, phone, etc.) as well as a prof of purchase.
They didn't elaborate on the proof of purchase requirement, so my dad emptied the coffee can into a plastic bin, went to his workshop, returned with a pair of tin snips, and cut the steel UPC code off of the coffee can!
Six to eight weeks later...
The coffee company sent my dad a letter explaining to him that the receipt was the proof of purchase that was required, but had found my dad as so dilligent as to have cut off the UPC with a pair of tin snips that they gave him the $2.00 as well as five coupons for free coffee.
I still give my dad shit for that to this day. And kudos to Folgers for seeing past the impending dementia of my father!
"This food is problematic."
I almost got fucked by officemax and sprint. Officemax had a shitty deal on my phone at the same time that Sprint was offering $100 off. The officemax people didn't supply me with the info for the Sprint rebate, just the officemax one. I had to call Sprint and get all of the info, which took a couple of calls. Interestingly, when the Sprint rep called the Officemax store, they were rude to her!
It all ended okay, though. I got 2 $100 cheques in about 2 months.
Companies that give rebates definately know that most people won't send the forms in. I bet that the interest that they make in the 8-16 weeks that they hold your money makes up for most of the "loss" anyway.