Rebate Nation

[pseydtonne]

I just bought a new vacuum cleaner. It can use the same hoses as the canister vac my mom bought in the Seventies. However, it's severely quieter. Oh, and compared to the upright vac my mom got recently, it sucks (in the same way that Primus sucks). When I grabbed the oriental rug from my old bedroom, I made several passes with her upright but had more success with her stiff broom. I took a brief moment's swing with this canister and found myself grinning like a Fifties housewife.

I'm now cursed with another rebate receipt. Even Sears has taken a shine to these ridiculous receipt-based mail-in rebates. Once I add this receipt to the mail in the morning, I'll have $150 in pending rebate checks. Why should a normal person have that much filed under "accounts receivable"?

Best Buy's recent comments in the Gate leave me wondering why they're so keen to hand out rebates anyway. Does this allow them to track who returns products, or are they just fetishizing small amounts of money to return to people? I'm kungfused.

I suppose there isn't much to complaint about, eh? I'll be getting some beer money (or, in my case, pizza money) sometime late in the summer. You still have to wonder how much pending money is floating around Calais, Maine (where the Best Buy rebate forms go)? Do the postal workers go extra-slow in that town?

Wait a minute... I was pleased about vacuuming. That doesn't sound right. That kind of activity suggests sexual repression or anal retention, right? I turned into Owlie for a moment. It's a good thing I only have the one carpet.

Oh, but under the computer desks... and the cat litter box... and I see cruft between the sink and the bathtub...

-Grant grant grant sleepies, Dante

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I've currently got a $150 rebate waiting to wind its way through the system, but that's for a single item rather than a collection of several things.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Rebates make stores enormous amounts of money, for the same reasons as credit card charges: people are forgetful and stupid, and money plus time equals more money.

1. Most people never get around to sending in rebates, or fail to follow the increasingly ridiculous constraints on how exactly to fill out the forms and attach the receipts and cut out the UPCs and mail between this date and that date and whatnot. So that's free money for the store -- $50 they don't have to give back, because people can't follow rules. Free money.
2. "Float". I'm sure you're familiar with float cash, but here's the refresher. You pay CircuBestUsa $150 for a widget, with a $50 rebate, on July 1st. On July 9th, you finally mail off the rebate. On September 27th (hey, still less than 8 weeks -- you count your blessings!), you get your $50 rebate. That was like 2 months that they had an extra $50; two months when it was earning interest for them, not you. That $50 is their float capital, and some business live entirely on it.
3. Then, some rebate places never actually give you the rebate; there have been a number of cases where there were 3rd-party rebates, and the master rebaters never "got around" to sending the checks out at all, and finally just declared bankruptcy and went away. This is the only part that is even remotely illegal.

That $150 in your accounts receivable? That's $150 that should be earning interest for you, right now, but those companies will hold it from you as long as they possibly can, earning interest the whole time. That's why they do it.