Daily Dose of Common Sense

Have you seen a Blu-ray player that retails for $200, but comes with a $50 rebate? Sounds good, right? Well, you may never see that $50. Companies love mail-in rebates because consumers jump on them and yet most people never mail them in. Or, the consumer doesn’t fill out the rebate form “correctly,” which gives companies the right to refuse the rebate. Either way, this helps to add up to the $500 million in unclaimed rebates each year.

Rebate redemption rates never hit 100 percent. They rates generally range from 5 percent to 80 percent, depending on the value of the rebate. While vendors have accelerated nearly every other aspect of the purchasing process in recent years — from overnight shipping to 24/7 instant chat support — rebates are still stuck in the stone age to discourage redemption.

Many companies run deceptive or intentionally difficult rebate campaigns. They don’t want you to be able to claim the money because that’s money out of their pocket. So you lose out because you didn’t read the fine print that said your rebate needed to be mailed from a post office within 30 hours of purchase. In recent years, the FTC has taken issue with many big companies, such as Buy.com and Office Depot, for deceptive advertising and delayed delivery on rebate payment.

I was excited to see that New Jersey is considering a measure to eliminate the mail-in rebate altogether. The legislation would, “requires retailers to charge consumers an advertised after-rebate price, rather than making them send in coupons or log on to manufacturer’s websites to claim their savings.” It would then be the retailer’s responsibility to get the rebate from the manufacturer. Rhode Island and Connecticut already have this law in place.

So, manufacturers, stop making consumers jump through hoops for a couple of lousy bucks. Give us the real price from the get-go, and we won’t hate you later when our rebate form is declared invalid. Consumers, if you decide to purchase a rebate product, read the fine print before you buy it. And, make copies of everything before you mail the rebate away for fulfillment.

[Via the fine folks at The Consumerist.]

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.