I loathe rebates.
Anyone who has dealt with them knows that rebates are a trick.
Those who offer rebates know that many people (estimates are usually around 50%) never send them in. It’s the old “road to hell is paved with good intentions” syndrome.
Some other percentage send in their paperwork, but never get their rebates back. If you can track down a live person, you might find out that they never received the rebate form, or that something was wrong with the paperwork. Or, worse, they might claim to have sent the rebate, but you never received it.
Given that the average rebate that I’ve seen tells you to wait anywhere from 4-12 weeks for your rebate, chances are pretty good that you might even have forgotten about it.
Rebates are a scam.
Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only way to get a good price. (Latest example: Hitachi TravelStar SATA 5K250 250GB for $80 after a $30 rebate.)
So here are some simple tips that I’ve started to use every time I buy something that has a rebate:
1) As soon as you place the order, fill out the rebate form. Right now your mental energy for whatever you bought. You’re excited about it. Put that energy to good use.
Now, filling out the form is a crucial piece of the puzzle. My overarching theme here will be “Don’t Give Them Any Excuse To Not Give You Your Rebate” so you’ll want to avoid filling out the form in your horrible handwriting (yes, it is), and use your computer. (See the PDFPen note, below.)
2) Address the envelope with the address where you need to send the rebate. Now. Again, use the “I Bought Something I Wanted At A Good Price” vibe. Address the envelope.
3) Mark up the rebate form with everything you need to send in with the form. Usually you need:
a) A copy of the receipt (this is probably already in your email from when you placed the order) b) A copy of the rebate form c) The UPC from the box
(Check the form to see if you need anything else.)
Obviously you don’t have “C” yet because it hasn’t arrived yet, but get everything together.
4) Put everything in the envelope. Now leave it somewhere you’ll be able to find it in a few days.
5) Add a note to your calendar, 1 week from today Make it clear what the rebate is for, i.e. “Send in Rebate for Widget Master 2000”
6) Look at the rebate form, see when it has to be postmarked. Add a note to your calendar a day or two earlier.
7) When it comes, make sure that it works before you cut out the UPC. My former advice would have been “Send in the rebate right now!” but remember, once you cut out the UPC, you can’t return the item. Whatever amount you get back for the rebate can’t compare with the purchase price of a defective item. (This is why you made a note in your calendar in Step 5).
8) Collect It and Copy It! Once you’re sure that it works, find your envelope, double check the list of things you need to mail-in (cut out the UPC, if needed). Then make a copy of everything, especially the UPC, staple them all together, and put them in your “Waiting For” or “Pending” file. Look on the rebate form for how long you should expect to wait, usually it’s something like 6-8 weeks. Put a note on your calendar at the latest date you should have to wait (i.e. 8 weeks in our example), something like “Have you received Widget rebate?”
9) Mail it so you can Track It Sure you can just slap a couple of stamps on it and stick it in the mail. Is that what you want to do? No, no it is not. You want to be able to track it, ideally you want to get confirmation that it was delivered. This will cost you a couple of bucks. Is your $30 rebate worth $2 to make sure you get it back?
10) Wait. This is the hardest part. Actually, it’s not. The hardest part is filling out all the stupid paperwork and making sure you’ve got it all together. Waiting is, by contrast, pretty damn simple. Just don’t forget (that’s why you made the note in your calendar in Step 8).
Using these simple steps, I’ve gotten every rebate that I’ve been eligible for, and, because I had the reminder, I was able to remember a $100 rebate for Audible.com that had been “lost” in their system. It ended up taking me several months to get it all straightened out, and by the end of it they had given me 3 additional credits (each one valid for a free audiobook, worth a total of another $40-50).
PDFPen
I’ve got Adobe Acrobat, but I would never subject myself to using it to fill out a PDF. I use PDFPen by Smile On My Mac (aka SOMM). (NOTE: I use PDFPenPro, but I believe the same features are in PDFPen).
The trick is to use loosen up the kerning (in non font-geek terms, that means “Increase the space between each letter”) which you can find under Format → Font → Kern → Loosen:
Fortunately the folks at SOMM made a keyboard shortcut for “Loosen”: cmd+L (note: you use a lowercase L even though it is shown as an uppercase L)
The steps are pretty simple:
1) Click the Text field button 2) Highlight area where you want to put in text 3) Type the text 4) Change it to a fixed width font (Courier-14 is a good choice) 5) Adjust the kerning
How simple is it? Here’s a 1 minute video of me starting to fill out a form (NOTE: will open in a new window)
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Rebates aren’t a scam per se; they’re a dual pricing system. The scam, or myth at least, is the idea that single flat pricing exists. It doesn’t because it can’t, and it can’t because we have a society with grave wealth inequalities that mean a half-hour of your life doesn’t have the same risk value as a half-hour of someone else’s.
Rebates are simply work - they allow you to turn some of your time, intelligence and capacity for stress into money, subsidised by richer people who have different money vs. opportunity cost tradeoffs. The unfortunateness comes in the bureaucracy of it all, because we don’t trust each other enough to honestly indicate our relative wealth without a lot of paper effort in between. Rather like growing a long feathery tail to indicate fitness, only here we use makework to indicate lack of wealth. ;)
All that said, I hate rebates too and appreciate the PDFPen link, as well as your system.