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.