I buy lots of electronics and have been experiencing a trend lately with rebates. It may be just paranoia on my part but thought I would post this blog entry to see if anyone else is seeing the same pattern.
I bought another LCD monitor and with it was a mail-in rebate for 30.00. Like all of these, you spend time to gather the required information, sent it in, and after a good 6 weeks time, you get a check. Done? Not quite because the “Pay To the Order of” has misspelled my last name. If this was the first time this happened, it would not be an issue but 3 times in the last 6 months, something seems wrong.
Could it be that there is a strategy out there to raise the cost of accounting on the payee so that they at some point think it is not even worth it to pursue? I wish we could see the statistics of all the people who go through with the mail-in but because of the run around, end up ultimately not redeeming their rebate.
This information is not available so all we have to go on are patterns and paranoia. Is 30 minutes of sitting on hold and filing more paperwork worth $30.00? At some point, everything come to a cost/benefit decision.
—tk