Rebate Warning~! Trendnet (801.11G pci)

They're up to the rebate games of yore.....not sending you your rebate even
though they acknowledged they go it in the beginning; then waiting for you to
complain so they send you an "your rebate is valid and should arrive in 8-10
weeks" email.
Then you fire off an angry email telling them you've already waited 10-12
weeks and they then send you another one saying "It should arrive shortly".

Why doesn't some AG in some state take these rebate assholes to court in an
open class action suit?

How many of you got your rebates only after you complained?

 

Trendnet is one of the few rebates that I've gotten without any problems.

OTOH, SMC sent me an email telling me I sent in the wrong UPC, and I
should resubmit it. I sent in the UPC on the box that the NIC was
packaged in; it has the model number on the box, and the model number on
the rebate form with a different UPC number. So this particular rebate
was designed so that nobody would qualify. Bastards.

Best regards,
Bob

 

SMC has eight different SMC7004xxxx models. It wouldn't surprise me at
all if someone selected the wrong model to qualify for a rebate.
I bought one, and had trouble differentiating the features. Then
difficulty differentiating the model numbers. If someone put a box back in
the wrong place on the shelf...
http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?sec=Products&pg=Barricade-Matrix&site=c
7004BR 7008BR 7004WBR 7004ABR 7008ABR 7004AWBR 7004VBR 7004VWBR 7004FW 7004WFW
Only four of those are wireless.

With the heavy rebates, the wireless that I bought was cheaper than the
wired.

 

My favorite rebate rippoff was for a Sony CD burner. Sony "renewed"
the rebate offer every month for 3 months. It looked like one
continuous rebate for 3 months, but wasn't. It was 3 seperate offers.
Along with the CD burner came a rebate form. However, if the dealer
didn't empty the shelf each month at exactly the right date, the
rebate coupons in the box were for the previous rebate offer. Of
course nobody noticed the one digit difference in the offer numbers.
So, I ended up with a $50 hole in my budget because Sony couldn't
figure out that retailers would not stuff new coupons in sealed boxes
or otherwise insure that their customers got the correct rebate
coupons. While not designed to disqualify everyone, this trick was
guaranteed to screw everyone for about 5 days past the offer deadline.
Last time I checked, Sony is still doing exactly the same trick.

In my office are a pile of refused rebates. I like to show them to
various sales personalities at the local stores in case they think
rebates are such a wonderful thing. My guess is that the total is
about $250 over a 3 year period. A few were justifiably refused
because I'd wated too long to mail in the form, although most of those
were the result of my envelope sitting around their mail room until
someone decided it was time to process them. The rest are $10 and $20
refusals for all manner of specious and erronious reasons. I don't
know how these rebate houses really operate, but I suspect that they
have a quota of arbitrary rejections as part of their plan to save
their clients some money.

Despite these losses, the bulk of my rebates have been paid, and
usually in a reasonable time. Intuit manages to complicate purchasing
their tax software every year, but still paid within the promised 90
days. My guess is that the arbitrary rejection rate is about 1 in 5
rebates. Not good, but tolerable.

Caveat Emptor.

 

Although it's ancient history now, one of my first rebate experiences
was with a Sony home CD player. It came with $100 worth of coupons
toward the purchase of CDs. When I tried to use the first one, the store
clerk informed me that the $2 coupon would only count toward a CD
selling for "list" price. They already had discounted all their CDs by
about $5. So if I wanted to use the coupon it would cost me $3 extra per
disk. My last rebate experience was with a Dell laptop last November. It
was the middle of June (7 months later) when I finally received the
rebate. This was after many phone calls, angry letters, emails,
resubmitting the packing slip, resubmitting the invoice, and putting up
with their lies and deceit.

I no longer participate in rebates at all and won't consider them when
price shopping. If a store/mfg wants to sell me something, the price I
pay at the register is the price I shop by.

 

I didn't wait that long. When they welched on some sort of Web-dollars
credit, I told them I was going to return the system. I was at day 29, so
I was going to ship it back the next day. They magically applied a credit
to my Visa card, instead of the stupid web-dollars.

I think that, but $30 off on a $39 item is hard to pass up.
I do a lot of rebates. I am entirely likely to buy something I don't need
based on the rebate. I only remember being stiffed once, by a case of
champagne whose rebate had expired 9 months before I bought it.

At Fry's, I have purchased lots of stuff that is free, or nearly so, after
rebate. The only problem that I have is if the rebate expires "soon", you
lose the ability to return an item with no UPC to the store for a refund if
something dies within the return period.

Beyond some weird advertising method, or hope that "breakage" (the industry
term for unclaimed rebates/calling card usage, etc) makes up some cost,
one use of the rebate is to introduce a lower price.
Rebate it for 30 days, then lower the price. You avoid having "price
match" problems that way.