If it Has a Rebate, Don't Buy it!

Hoodwink, bamboozle or what ever you want to call it, manufacturers and retailers are sometimes guilty of this:
'Concealing one's true motives from especially by elaborately feigning good intentions so as to gain an end.'

This is the practice of offering a rebate or gift card for x amount of $ if the consumer purchases a certain product. What happens:

1. The consumer sees an ad offering a product at what seems to be a really good price and fails to notice the fine print stating the price is after mail in rebate.

2. The consumer goes ahead and buys the product thinking (very naively) the money/gift card will be a nice bonus when it arrives. Hopefully they will receive it eventually.

3. The consumer takes the product home. If the customer reads the fine print about what is necessary to receive the rebate and dutifully fills out the form/forms correctly, finds the proof of purchase on the product, copies and mails all of the required information, they MAY receive the promised check/gift card in anywhere from five to twelve weeks.

4. A lot of times the consumer makes a mistake on the forms or uses the wrong form.
(This happened to me once, the retailer gave me the wrong rebate slip and dummy me failed to notice it. Rebate denied!)

5. Other times consumers just forget about it as it takes time to collect copy and mail all of the required information. This is exactly what the manufacturers and retailers are hoping will happen. They have already enticed the consumer to buy and they have the consumer's money. They really don't want to have to give some of it back.

In the past I have had some very good experiences with rebates. The best was for Microsoft. I purchased a tax program that offered a rebate on Microsoft Money if I purchase both together, as well as a rebate for the tax program. I got the rebate from Microsoft in less than a month and the rebate for Taxcut came shortly hereafter.

But there have been some bad experiences with rebates as well. Two of these I have already documented on my blog, Home Depot and Symantec. The Symantec fiasco made me very unhappy, as a result I will never ever buy another product from Symantec. The Home Depot gift card was a really fun experience! Took a lot of phone calls and four months to get that all taken care of, but at least I did finally get the promised cards.

Now I am waiting on another rebate check, this time from Samsung. In July I purchase a Samsung computer monitor from Circuit city. I did not purchase it because it had rebates offered (two), but because it was the monitor I wanted. Since the rebates were offered, I completed and copied the requested forms and mailed them the very same day. One was for Circuit City ($30) and one was for Samsung ($50). After all, that is $80 and I would be a fool not to send for the money!

In less than six weeks I received the rebate from Circuit City. I kept checking with Samsung's rebate site and the site had no record of receiving the rebate request. I called the phone number on the site and received information it could take twelve weeks.

OK, I waited. Finally the information was there, but they were denying the rebate! The reason? They said it was postmarked after the offer date range! Now I know sometimes items are postmarked the day after they are mailed, but I mailed that rebate on July 18 and they said it was postmarked on Sept 22. No way!

I called the center again and spoke to a guy with a very strong accent who told me I would be receiving a card in the mail with instructions on how to get this resolved and get my rebate. He said the card was mailed on October 3rd. He assured me once I received the card and called again, it would all be taken care of.

The mail came today, October 17, and still no card. So I called again and this time I spoke to a girl who also had an accent. She looked up my record and I explained the entry for the postmark was an error. She put me on hold for a minute and then came back and asked me to hold again. In a minute she came back and told me I would receive the $50 rebate check in four weeks. I thanked her and hung up. (While I was on hold, I looked up the address for the Attorney General of the State ofTexas. If I don't receive the check, I will use the address!)

I had previously decided never to buy a product just because it had a rebate/gift card offer. I have modified my decision to this,I will never buy a product IF it has a rebate offer! Never! The whole concept of rebates/gift cards is just a method to entice consumers and in some instances, try to hoodwink, bamboozle or otherwise cheat! I firmly believe that Home Depot and Samsung had no intention to actually send the promised rebates/gift cards unless I followed up and kept following up. I hope I am wrong, but circumstances have led me to believe this.

I am aware that manufacturers and retailers may be outsourcing the rebate offers to consumers and are not aware of the aggravation this is causing. Generally though, a resource center employed by a business only follows guidelines that are provided to them by that business. It would be in their best interests to check to see how these centers are handling requests.

If a business is offering a rebate, it is bad enough that a consumer has to go through all of the process of getting together all the requested material, filling out the forms, copying everything and then putting postage on it and taking it to mail. It should not be necessary for a consumer to have to call and call, wait and wait before obtaining what has been promised at the point of sale.

Martha

Martha's Web
Martha's Place

Update: I finally received the rebate from Samsung, on November 24. It took over 4 months! If I hadn't challenged Samsung about the postmark, I would never have received it. This whole process only confirms my belief that rebate options are an open invitation to fraud that many companies are perpetrating on unsuspecting customers.

Why no 'Other'?

I use the Internet a lot. I mean a LOT! I wonder what I did before the Internet was available! I shop, compare services, check companies for quality ratings (I use AngiesList), I use email including Yahoo Groups and I have two personal websites and a website for a charity and one for a Yahoo group.

If it is possible to contact any business or service using email, I much prefer that to using the telephone. One reason for that is the endless tripe you have to hear before you get to the right department (if you are lucky) and awful hold music that most businesses seem to think will keep you entertained while you are on indefinite hold. Some of the 'menus' you are subjected to makes me wonder what idiot came up with the whole concept in the first place? (I rather suspect some of them, in spite of the extremely annoying "Your call is important to us" message, hope you will give up and hangup in frustration so they won't have to address your issue. Have you ever noticed that none of the menu options are what you need? Why don't they have an option for 'Other'?

Email is usually much simpler. You can type what you want and press send and that is that. That is IF you can find an email address! So many sites just don't provide a contact email any more and if they do, you get a scripted response that does not seem as though anyone really read what you sent. This is pretty frustrating as well. Sometimes after lots of searching you can find a sitemap and see 'Contact' listed. Don't get your hopes up just yet. It could be a form to fill out, that's no problem, well maybe it is.

I am using a pretty nifty little utility know as 'SiteAdvisor'. It is extremely popular with folks in the know as it identifies sites that have questionable content that could possibly expose your computer to malware. I really like this service, provided free, at least for now, to users by McAfee a very well know and popular provider of virus scanners, firewalls and other security products.
The problem is, today all at once I am getting a warning everytime I go to a site I know is ok. The warning is as follows:
"You have attempted to establish a connection with "dss2.siteadvisor.com". however the security certificate presented belongs to "dss1.siteadvisor.com". It is possible, though unlikely, that someone may be trying to intercept your communication with this web site.

If you suspect the certificate shown does not belong to "dss2.siteadvissor.com", please cancel the connection and notify the site administrator."

I would dearly love to notify the site administrator! I have searched this site for contact information to no avail. The only contact form I have found wants me to input what the question is about, it lists all of the programs McAfee sells, but I guess since it isn't selling SiteAdvisor they don't plan to support it in any way.
The SiteAdvisor site wants me to 'signup' before it will let me contact anyone. On the feedback page I am given five options and I have to choose one.

1.Submit a site for testing
Select this option and get a field to input an url for a site.
2.Leave user comments about a site
Select this option and you have to signup to be a reviewer before anything else can happen.
3.Leave comments as a site owner
Select this option and get: Once you become verified as a site owner you can post a comment on your site's report page.
4.General McAfee product support
Select this and get redirected to McAfee's Technical support for their commercial products. If you click on the tecnical support links, there is no option for SiteAdvisor!
5.Contact our business team
Guess what, you get an email address for someone there! I already know this would be an exercise in frustration!

Why no option for Other? My guess is they don't want to be bothered. I suspect this is the same reason you don't get an option for Other on those endless, pratling phone menus!

I am still using SiteAdvisor and hoping the stressful warning will soon disappear.

Martha

Martha's Web
Martha's Place

Practicing What I Preach

July 19

Don't do as I do, do as I say!

Sometimes I learn the hard way not to take shortcuts and yesterday I had it brought home to me.

I 'know' to turn off all running programs including virus scanners when installing a program. I also 'know' it is much better to uninstall an old program and then install an upgrade.

However, just because I know better, doesn't mean I did it that way yesterday! SpySweeper, my very most favorite spyware scanner, has a new program upgrade. I downloaded the upgrade and proceded to install it.

Not finished with real dummy stuff, the same day I had gone to the Windows Update site and updated Windows. (I think I should have waited!)

All of a sudden, my system seemed to be dragging. Some programs would open, but not run. In order to close them, I had to do a hard boot. No Task Manager would come up. I could open some programs that worked ok, but one of my games caused a blue screen when I exited. What the heck is going on? Maybe System Restore would work. So I did a restore from the day before the troubles all started.

Things seemed to be working ok, so back to Windows update and updated again. No more problems, the updates seem to be ok.

So what was causing the problems I had earlier? Memory failing? Harddisk problems?

After a frustrating entire afternoon of trying to troubleshoot the problems, the 'Great Light' dawned. There was a problem with the new SpySweeper install. Since I had done the System Restore, I needed to upgrade it again. Then I figured out I needed to do what I have always said to do, uninstall and then reinstall, never upgrade over a previous version. I looked for the license code and couldn't find it. I ALWAYS put the license code in a text file in the download folder for a paid program, but not this time! I had to go to Webroot's site and request the license code be sent to me. (Sigh!)

As soon as I got the code, I uninstalled SpySweeper and rebooted the computer. Then I stopped the virus scanner and installed the new version of SpySweeper.

The computer was like new again, running oh so fast. Programs opened, ran as advertised and closed with no problems.

Lesson learned. Even though some upgrades say you don't need to uninstall to upgrade, my advise is this: Unless the program upgrade specifically says "Do Not Uninstall the old version", uninstall the old version! Be sure to disable your virus scanner as well. When they say to close all running programs at the beginning of an install, they mean it and don't forget the virus scanner!

(And make sure you know where your license codes are for downloaded programs!)

Oh, yes, the reason I couldn't find the license code for SpySweeper in the download folder, I originally installed it from a CD I bought at Fry's. The license code is on the CD envelope. Duh!

Martha

Martha's Web
Martha's Place

Cheap Gas is Gone Forver

We need to get over it. Europe has been paying these high prices for a long time, however, their prices have been high due to taxes. The problems are too many people (countries) chasing too few barrels of crude. That may be a very simplified version of the problem, but it is only going to get worse as more and more of the developing countries' appetites increase for energy.

Then there is the 'greed' factor. As long as people are willing to pay for energy the prices will not go down. This will cause the divide between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' to grow wider. The obscene profits by the major oil companies shows just what the greed factor is about. They have us all just where they want us. We are too dependant on our gas gulping cars and ever more electronic goodies that need more and more energy. It isn't just the oil companies, it is the oil-rich countries as well.

There is also the undisputable fact that there is only so much oil on this planet and sooner or later it is going to be (gasp) gone. Finished! Caput! No more! We need to be furiously looking for alternative energy sources and economical ways to make them available to everyone, including the 'have nots'. If the major oil companies would invest just a fraction of those obscene profits into research, it might happen, but I'm not sure they will. But when the oil is gone, the profits be gone as well.

I know it is popular to blame the President, Congress or whoever is in charge for the high price of fuel. The last time I checked, they have no control over what the price of crude may be at any time. True, some of the policies set by government probably have an impact on prices, but I really don't think it is the government's fault that gas is so high priced. I don't think it is their fault that we had so many hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc., either!

Martha

Martha's Web
Martha's Place

Mr. or Mrs. Know-it-all

At some time or other, almost everyone has had a Mr or Mrs Know-it-all in their life. It could be a family member or a co-worker or maybe just a casual acquaintance. However or whenever, this person can be very obnoxious and irritating to most folks.

I had a family member that was a 'know-it-all'. If you found a bargain, she found a better one. If you had a good experience, she had a one just like it, only better. If you had a bad day, she had a worse one. If you just learned something, she couldn't believe you didn't know that! The rest of the family tolerated her, well, because she was 'Family'! For me she is now no longer a member of my family, but that's another story.

Occasionally, a 'know-it-all' will be on an email list or group. Eventually, the 'know-it-all' cause so many complaints that the list or group either dies or the 'know-it-all' is removed. That's too bad, because this one probably needs to be
accepted and could provide assistance and knowledge if it was presented in a manner other than 'know-it-all'.

Sometimes we encounter a 'know-it-all' that really doesn't know it all or anything at all, just pretends to 'know'. Unfortunately this can lead to problems if this individual makes people believe what he/she says. This can lead to more problems for those who believe everything the 'know-it-all' says.

Why do people become 'know-it-alls'? Probably because they are insecure individuals desperate for attention. They probably mean well, they just don't know how to get the attention they want any other way. They may think because they have 'an answer' for everything, folks will admire them and give them the attention they seek, while in reality they are having the opposite effect.

Martha

Martha's Web

Martha's Place

Another Software Spasm

(This is a followup to a post I made last August, Software Spasms.)

I like to play games but in no way am I a 'Gamer'. I like the simple games like MahJong or Spider Solitaire. Every once in a while I will try a new game and usually I just delete it after two or three sessions. But a while back I found a puzzle type game that I really liked and I bought it. When a sequel was released, I downloaded the sequel and bought it as well.

This was on Saturday, April 8, 2006.
So I installed it, clicked the icon to open it and waited. And waited. It didn't open. I checked in Task Manager and there it was, running, but it wouldn't open. Hmm, this has a familiar ring! I tried uninstalling it and reinstalling, no go. I re-downloaded it and tried again. Still it wouldn't open.

Frustration set in and I decided to contact support and I sent them an email. After three days I heard from them. They more or less told me to do what I had already done, but I wanted to tell them I did everything they suggested and on the off chance there was a new download, I again re-downloaded the game and reinstalled it.

Did it open? No, but Task Manger showed it was running. Sigh! Remembering my previous problem with a 'software spasm', I stopped my spyware program from running in the backgound. No go, the game still wouldn't open. So I tried something else. I stopped my anti-virus program, and now the game opened. It worked just fine.

So if I want to play the game, I 'pause' my antivirus, just long enough for the game to open. Once the game is running, the anti-virus can run in the background and there are no problems.

Who can say what is going on? I wonder how many people are trying to install programs that won't work because of a conflict with another program? More than likely they are blaming the wrong thing for their software that doesn't work!

Ethics on the WWW ?

There is a lot of 'free' stuff on the World Wide Web. Just about everyone likes free stuff, who wouldn't? But sometimes the 'free' stuff really isn't free, in order to get the free stuff you have to make a compromise of some sort, like agree to view ads, or let someone follow your web surfing. (This is how a lot of spyware gets planted on computers!)

What some people may not realize or stop to think about, software offered for 'free' is still the result of someone's labor. Really free software is usually offered because there really are folks, who for whatever reason, are offering software they wrote because of their own need. Once it was written they have decided to share with others the fruits of their labor.

Sometimes these folks decide to keep making improvements to their product and eventually the programs become very substantial and are no longer free, but become 'shareware'. A very well known graphics program started out this way and a lot of others as well. After all, it takes work to write, test and rewrite software. Really good software program writers deserve to receive compensation for their work.

So when unscrupulous thugs try to take advantage of someone else's hard work and offer 'cracks' for software, the people who go for it are in fact, thieves as well. Most of these same people who use 'crack' software probably would never dream of shoplifting or breaking in to someone's business and home to steal merchandise, but they are in effect stealing someone else's hard work.

There are also some 'work-arounds' offered for services. One that comes to mind is a program that offers to allow a user to get around the requirement that Yahoo email must be a paid for (premium) service in order to allow downloaded emails of their popular email service to a user's computer. Again, this is in effect stealing!

Why an otherwise honest person decides to take advantage of a 'crack' and steal is simply beyond me. I can only surmise that these folks just don't stop to think or maybe it's because they just decide they want it, so get it and phooey on ethics!

Martha
Martha's Web

Stealing My Bandwidth Part II

Last time I said if the offenders stealing bandwidth did not remove the hotlinked image from their pages I would publish the thieving pages.

Due to circumstances beyond my control I have been unable to identify all of the bandwidth thieves (My site was down due to server problems and there are still problems with the statistics server) but I have identified 13 of the offenders, four of which have honored my request to remove the hotlink.

I am sure there are more, however they were not contacted with a request to remove the hotlink.

These were asked and chose to ignore the request.

http://www.myspace.com/doknock
http://myspace.com/shawnhag
http://www.myspace.com/samara_553
http://www.myspace.com/fairybug
http://www.myspace.com/synx
http://www.myspace.com/worldsgreatestdad
http://www.myspace.com/heyitscolleen
http://www.myspace.com/bowlingkev300
http://www.myspace.com/feliciahogan

Repeated requests to MySpace have been ignored as well. As soon as I find the time, I will identify the individual IP addresses and request my host to block them.

Isn't it fun on the Internet?

Martha

Martha's Web

Stealing My Bandwidth

The Internet is loaded with clever and/or pretty eye candy. This consists of joke files usually in the form of jpg or animated gif files or photos which are in various file types like jpg, png, etc.

A lot of owners of personal web sites like to use these files to liven up their pages or to convey a theme. Some of them make their own image files or use files created by talented folks. There are a number of these files that the creators have given open permission to copy (save) and use on personal web sites. Notice the word 'copy'. If a website owner 'copies' the file and pastes it to their own site, this will cause a 'hit' on the original owner's site every time the image is accessed on the 'copied' site. This is known as 'hotlinking' files. Most of the sites that provide these free files have a notice that users should save the files to their computers and not use the 'hotlinking' procedure.

Hotlinking can cause the original owner big bucks if their images are used on a lot of sites using the 'copy and paste' method of adding images. Every time a 'hit' on the copied image a bit of bandwidth is used on the original owner's site. If the image is fairly large, like a photo being used for a background, this can cause quite a lot of bandwidth for the original owner to foot the bill. Even if the image is small, if enough 'hits' (times accessed) are made, it can cause the bandwidth bill to get big!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people using free services for personal pages that really do not have a clue about real websites, hotlinking or bandwidth theft.Two of the biggest free service for pages described as online diaries and journals, rofiles, blogs, etc., are Xanga.com and MySpace.com.

Once the users for these pages discovered images on my website, the hits on my bandwidth went ballistic! Over 5000 hits for the month of December alone! This has caused me to work overtime trying to stop or disuade these users. Educating them would probably work best, for which I have enlisted the help of a friend who joined MySpace for just that purpose! (Thanks, Enon!)

Some of the users are trying to do the right thing, but a request from one just brought an email with obsenities!

I hope they will comply with my request to remove the hotlink from their pages, if not, I will publish the offenders' names and page addresses here on January 6.

Some terms in this article explained:

Bandwidth

Hotlinking

Until later,

Martha

Martha's Web