Mark's Notebook


	If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him. - Thomas Carlyle

Getting money back a constant headache

San Jose Mercury News Opinion

Friday 17 December 2004, 1:49 pm
Keywords: Computer Topics , News Articles

By Mike Langberg

Mail-in rebates are the Scrooge of today's holidays, forcing shoppers to slice up their fingers while scraping off proof-of-purchase labels and baffling us with deliberately arcane redemption forms.

Shame on Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard, Circuit City, Sony, Fry's Electronics, Symantec and all the other electronics retailers and manufacturers that hypocritically claim devotion to their customers, yet collaborate in a system that customers universally despise.

Nowhere is the problem worse than in retail sales of computers and computer peripherals, with ads that trumpet prices hundreds of dollars lower than what you actually pay in the store.

Mail-in rebate offers are a misguided attempt to get ahead of the game with artificially low prices, because manufacturers and retailers know many consumers will never bother to complete the rebate forms.

Let's do the math: If you mark down an inkjet printer from $199 to $149 and sell 100,000 units, you've missed $5 million in revenue. If you offer a $50 rebate on a $199 printer and ultimately send checks to half the buyers, you've only sacrificed $2.5 million.

This system gives the industry an ugly incentive to manage down the number of rebate requests it approves, by making the process of applying unnecessarily complicated and by using trivial technicalities to reject legitimate requests. No one keeps statistics on this, but I've heard too many horror stories not to believe there aren't abuses in this largely unregulated system.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/mike_langberg/104
38389.htm

Mark says: I hope I get my rebate checks on Mary's Christmas present! PC Connection has a nice setup where you get all the forms online. I got last year's rebate checks on a disk drive and a wireless router without incident. Although they did take a few weeks, in both cases the companies kept me informed via email.