Re: Dell Rebate Hassle to Death

Albert Silverman wrote:
If the difference between buying something and not buying it depends upon
the redemption of a mail-in rebate, then DON'T BUY IT.

Period.

The idea of the rebate is to make you think it costs less than it actually
costs you, when it's not at the register but delayed and procedurized, or
even simply impossible to get.

The benefit of a free economy depends on each transaction benefiting both
sides. This is very common, and the more of it you get, the higher the
standard of living of the nation. It depends though on each side understanding
the relative values of money and product - as well of course as the two sides
valuing it differently, so that the beneficial disagreement as to relative
value produces a profit for both.

If one side makes it hard to estimate the cost, then you get make more sales,
but many of them don't benefit the other side, and that's to be deprecated.

A fine example is Kroger supermarket pricing : the reason for 4/$7 pricing
is that most people can't tell what the hell it costs. (Try this experiment :
spot an odd tag, and ask a manager how much it costs each. Most of the time,
they can't figure it out. Shoppers are even less capable. One manager explained
that studies show that if you price 4/$7, people tend to buy 4, and that's why
they do it. It's not to confuse the other side of the transaction. Oh yeah?
Why are bananas 3 lbs/$1? Do people buy 3 lbs? No, it's to obscure the price.)

A rebate that's hard to get, even if you can get it, is the same sort of
difficulty placed in the way of realizing what the product is going to cost you.

It turns transactions, some of them, from voluntary to coerced by trickery,
and that is unethical.

--
Ron Hardin
rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
.

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