You are right, it indeed is “potential” money and not confirmed/in-the-pocket money. It does take planning and understanding of different things to be good at the rebate game, yes. There are some online forums that deal with rebates, like the SlickDeals Rebate Forums.

The company policies themselves, on their own rebates, play a huge factor as to whether or not one has a greater chance of getting back the promised rebate money.

I like your mentality of making purchases based on the price you actually pay, instead of assessing what you’ll get back. That can allow you to consider the rebate money as a surprise, and if no money comes back, then everything to be normal.

Good points James, I really like your comment. I would love to hear more from you on this and other things.

Anybody that tries to work the rebate system must become very informed of the current procedures, the type of rebate being offered, the amount being offered for rebate (is this going to cost more then the product is worth?) and must do enough research to see the track record on rebates received by individuals from the company offering the rebates in the first place.

I do not ever return a rebate for more reasons then what is mentioned in this article and the current responses to said article because when I do shopping, I look at the “original” offered price rather then the rebate price being advertised..

I make purchases based upon this so as to not feel obligated or slighted for a price I was not expecting to fork over in monetary value as the rebate “shuffle” is reminiscent of the card shuffle game one finds on the street corners of cities like NY.. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, I for one do not like to gamble my hard earned cash away on such ventures, as the rebate “shuffle game” requires more then my money, it requires my valuable time for which I cannot recoup if I lose..

Stay away from the rebate shuffle unless you want to become a warrior of rebates (I have met a few who do quite well in gambling)

Good to know Verizon handles their rebates like that. Customers should be allowed to submit their rebates online also. 2 weeks is a very good time to receive your rebate money back compared to the time it takes for most other companies to mail rebate checks back.

I agree with most of your points. I had to research rebates for my marketing class, and it is very true that most people do not bother to fill out the rebate forms. However, this also depends on the value of the rebate. If someone is expecting a three hundred dollar rebate, chances are very high that the person will fill out all the rebate forms and jump through all the hoops to get the money. If the rebate is for five bucks, then some people say, “Why bother.” It’s all about opportunity cost.

If I spent an hour filling out the forms, cutting off the UPC, and copying this and that for a ten dollar rebate, then I have lost money because of opportunity cost.

I also really liked your example of long-term cost savings regarding rebates (point #4). This is an excellent point, especially for electronics. A camera that was $400 with a $50 rebate may be $250 by the time the rebate check comes in the mail.

As a side note, I really liked the way Verizon handled their rebates. The rebates were all online, and I could check the status of my rebate at any time. I think I received my rebates after two weeks.

Take care and thanks for the great article.

Regarding the ink, you are right about ink cartridges costing the same almost everywhere. I used to buy a lot of Lexmark ink cartridges before and they almost always had the same price tag everywhere, both online and in retail stores: $32.95 .

Regarding your rebate, try mailing the envelope with the UPC code again. Usually Tiger Direct rebates are handled by a company they employ: OnRebate. You probably mailed the rebate to them and they are taking long time to process it. If you mailed it directly to PNY, I think it maybe be easier to contact them and get an answer out of them regarding the rebate that you did send out successfully. Judging from different online forums and Google, Tiger Direct has a lot of satisfied customers, but they have an increasing number of customers who never get any rebate money back, ever.

You should increase your rate of contacts with them through the phone or email. So far, that is usually the only way to get a rebate company to send out rebates when they are ignoring their responsibilities.

Anyway, yes, it was a lot of money in ink. I actually bought a combo pack and two single blacks, I think, so four cartridges overall, so it should have been more around $70 I think, so maybe the rebate was if you spent $60 now that I think about it. But the problem with ink is that no matter where you get it, it is the same price, or you only save a few pennies.

But, no, on the jump drives. I bought them both from Tiger Direct, but the first one was a PNY and the second a Sandisk. I’m not sure who I was supposed to get the rebate from for the first, but it was probably PNY. That’s the one where I was in a hurry and mailed an empty envelope before mailing all the stuff LOL, so maybe they figured I’m too stupid to get a rebate…

I think many companies take their sweet time before mailing back the rebate money. Sometimes, such companies hire “rebate specialists”, which are companies that simply take contract work to manage rebates for companies with hundreds of thousands of rebate claims. These companies take their time to return rebates, and sometimes you have to inquire further and sometimes even repeatedly to get them to actually send you the rebate. Both jumpdrives were from Sandisk, right? If so, Sandisks’ rebate policy takes a long time to send back rebates. That is good to know.

Yes, avoiding items with rebates altogether is the perfect thing to do. Good for you!

Chau, I prefer avoiding filling out such forms also. They usually ask you a lot of irrelevant questions also, like date of birth and email address.

Vera, that is nice to know. Also, they usually take time it seems, but as long as you get the money back, that’s good. Calling is always the best thing. It’s your money; you have every right to call when you were promised you could invest some money in something and see some of it back. And yes, you are right, it can get hard to resist good deals.

Nicole, heh, lucky you. Please share your secret with us. May be you are shopping with the right companies?

Sawai, thank you. Yes, it is strange indeed. I have seen similar signs also where the “upto” portion of a sale banner is glorified more than the rest of the banner. It would be interesting to see how many stores actually lure customers in like that while only offering 5-10% discounts, like you mentioned.

Isn’t it strange that corporates rely on cheating the customer to earn money.

We dont have rebates in our country (india). I dont think if companies do like this the concept of rebates will even be encouraged. However, In india during shopping season, shops here put up big posters which say “discouts UPTO 50%”, but the max discount they offer is not more than 5%-10%.

There are a lot of these scams these days. But we can’t resist trying it can we? I guess we have to stop trying our luck….

I did find myself avoiding items online after Christmas with all those sales if they said it was the price after a main in rebate. I’m not letting those cloud my jugement anymore, lol.