Rebate Roulette

Part of my medical situation required me to switch from my long-term optometrist to an opthamololgist. Once I completed all the new eye exams I ordered contacts and they came with a very nice rebate coupon worth $70. This immediately put me on notice that I should be very careful how I filled out and complied with the terms on that coupon. My experience with rebates has been mixed in that the issuers tend to look for reasons not to honor them. I’ve had a couple of mishaps involving personal computer components where a small technicality led to me not getting the money.

Believe me, this is not an experience isolated just to me. Retailers have a long history of offering incentive rebates on purchases but then making it very difficult to collect. These scams are well documented and people have been complaining about it for years. One of the up-front issues involves the store where you buy the product since they have to pay some of the fees involved in the processing of the rebate, typically done by an outside firm. You can be sure they are real happy to participate in programs that cut into their margins.

While women supposedly have a much better track record of closing the deal on rebates, some promotions have an estimated 90% failure to collect ratio. That’s huge, even if you include people like myself who are not natural born shoppers. At any rate, when I got the rebate coupon I immediately had to find my reading glasses because I don’t care if you are Ted Williams who supposedly had some of the best eyesight ever in baseball history, you can’t read this with 20/20. The requirements are not just rigid, they are downright dictatorial.

I decided to allocate some time to get this done on Saturday morning so I would be alert and ready to check, re-check, and double check this procedure. You have to be on your toes if you expect within the next few months to be receiving one of those carbon tear out postcard checks in the mail. My grandfather used to tell me when I messed something up that I had not been holding my mouth right, and I sure didn’t want that to happen.

I had to send the original of the sales receipt from where I purchased the contacts, because the instructions said a copy would not be accepted. This immediately caused me some concern since the original I was sent with my contacts looked like a photo copy, but that’s all I had, so that’s what they were sent. In addition, I had to include a copy of the receipt from the eye examination, along with a copy of the prescription itself, and the actual UPC codes off the four boxes of contacts. These had to be physically removed from each box, so I assume if and when I begin to use these new contacts I will really have fun if anything is wrong should I need to return them to the company I bought them from, because they will no longer have any UPC codes.

Okay, I got everything assembled and ready. I made the necessary copies and put together the qualifying documentation. It ended up being fairly thick so I stuck a couple of stamps on it just to be sure. It’s now on its journey into the area of the country once famous mostly for corn and wheat, but now has a reputation for telemarketing groups, call centers, and rebate processing operations. Hopefully, it will arrive and the clerk handling it will not find the coffee stain to be a reason to reject my rebate application. That rebate will make these 30 day disposable contacts almost affordable and I’m quite certain that if and when the check arrives, fall will be in the air and I most likely will have completely forgotten about it, so it will then become a pleasant surprise. Now that’s worth looking forward to, don’t you think? Have a great day! …..More later.