A Little Shame for Capitalist Pigs.
Warning: Rant ahead.

Generally, commerce is a wonderful thing, delivering lots of choices in quality, variety, and service. Think of what our economy delivers ($29 DVD players, available even to the poor. Out-of-season fruit and vegetables from formerly exotic locales. It puts "The Wells Fargo Wagon" of Americana to shame.)

While government-imposed regulations on the marketplace often misfire, there's still room for old-fashioned shame and consumer education. Here's my lesson: don't buy anything based on a rebate. You may be sorry.

About a month ago I bought a new printer, plus an external hard drive from OfficeMax and Circuit City, respectively. In both cases, the attractive shelf price was based on rebates. "Oh well," I thought. "Send in copy of the invoice, get cash. I can do that."

Once at home, I see that the hard drive rebate requires sending one pile of papers to one state, and another pile of papers to a second. Obtaining the rebate on the printer (roughly a price cut of 50 percent) requires photocopying the receipt, cutting out a piece of the cardboard box, and writing in some other information.

To date I've received one of the two rebates for hard drive. I also got a post card from another company, saying that I need to send in the serial number of the unit. This after, I'm sure, carefully studying the instructions.

Today I cut out yet another piece of the box, wrote the serial number on the postcard, and sending the package back to the remote post office box.

Obviously, the "trick" here is to entice suckers customers with a lowball price, knowing that some will, due to "process fatigue," never receive the lower price.

Should this practice be banned on grounds that it is deceptive? There's probably a self-styled consumer advocate somewhere ready to call for it. But for some people, jumping through the hoops is worth the trouble. In my case, the hoops were more difficult chore than I had imagined; next time, I'll look at the top line, not the alleged after-rebate price. (permalink)