As always, the GripeLog is backlogged with numerous deadbeat rebate complaints from readers. One thing that does seem to have changed a little in recent months, though, is who the victims blame for all those rebates gone bad. While in the past it's usually been the product vendor or the rebate fulfillment house, increasingly reader ire is focusing on the retailer.
In theory, on-line tracking systems should it make easier for retailers to straighten out rebate problems, but it doesn't always turn out that way in practice. "Staples has an 'Easy Rebates' system where you get to submit the rebate online and get your check without having to cut out UPCs or anything," wrote one reader. "Well, Staples Easy Rebates lately has been anything but easy, and the message boards are full of complaints. Their system is broken -- it's rejecting rebates for bogus and cryptic reasons. And it keeps displaying incorrect status information for the rebates that you've entered in the system."
This being the rebate game, though, there is naturally one possible culprit. "To be fair, what is not clear to me is how much of the Easy Rebate system's problem are Staples' doing and how much Parago's," the reader wrote. Parago, of course, is the parent company for RebatesHQ, a rebate fulfillment house we've discussed on more than one occasion. "When an item is listed as 'pending' is it because the system has not received the transaction information from Staples to validate it or is it that maybe the customer service people at Parago don't know how to deal with it? It's a murky situation where you're not really sure whose fault it is, but the rebate is sitting in limbo. Sadly, this is an example of something that should have made life much simpler for consumers but instead is now making it worse."
Another retailer drawing some fire from readers in recent months, particularly concerning its "free-after-rebate" rebates, is TigerDirect.com. "Back in August, TigerDirect was advertising a free-after-rebate deal on a Soyo tower case priced at $60 with three $20 rebates," one reader wrote. "I've been fighting with them five months now, and all I can determine is that Soyo lost two of three rebates I submitted. Just this week they finally paid one of the rebates - the middle one. Tiger is not much help other than acknowledging my e-mails with canned form responses saying they are checking into it. I am at the point now where I am going to stay away from sites that make you deal with these rip-off rebates."
Of course, retailers were using "free-after-rebate" deals to lure customers long before any of them were selling on-line, and that certainly hasn't changed. "I wish I had read your article sooner," wrote one reader ruefully. "I recently bought a laptop at CompUSA, and before I got out of the store they foisted on me several hundred dollars worth of 'free' merchandise -- a printer and some software from Norton and Microsoft." But the rebate process didn't work the way the CompUSA salesman had told him, and none of the rebates were honored. "You see, up to this point, I thought that the whole point of the paperwork was to keep dishonest people from collecting rebates on merchandise that they had not purchased. Since I had purchased my merchandise, at a live store with live people, with a database of purchases, I thought that proof of purchase would not be a problem for me. It was when I went in to CompUSA to ask for help -- and was rebuffed -- that the reality sank in. The purpose of the paperwork is not to prevent fraudulent collection of rebates. The purpose is to prevent legitimate collection of rebates."
Like I've always said, if they were willing to let all customers pay the after-rebate price, they would just give you a discount instead. When retailers lure you in with "free after rebate" promises, there's just no telling what might actually be in store for you.
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