Late last August, Richard wrote me regarding mail-in rebates. I had always found rebates a pain, but, like many consumers, I thought that my troubles were isolated incidents. Not any more. Take a look at Richard’s e-mail:

Shortly thereafter, I received another e-mail from Richard with further information:

Richard’s e-mail came at an opportune time, because we were about to go through our own Rebate Inferno, and the idea that we weren’t losing our minds was comforting.

Misery loves company. Consider this. We endured terrorists; Anthrax, Enron, et al, Saddam and SARS. Why should we have to endure Mail-in Rebates? Mail- in Rebates are another misery the beleaguered customer must endure so that corporate fat cats can have five homes in Colorado and a yacht worthy of the Americas Cup.

The underlying logic for Mail-in Rebates is that the average consumer is stupid and lazy. Thus, most will never get around to filing the paperwork and the rest can easily be duped into believing they didn’t do it right. The problem with this assumption is that anyone who buys a computer or computer peripheral is pretty far up there on the IQ and productivity scale. So why is the technology industry trying to alienate their best customers?

Our own misery began last July when we purchased a top-of-the line Dell laptop for our daughter, Laura, who was starting graduate school at UCLA.

On July 21, Laura filled out, and mailed, a form titled “Mail-In Redemption Form.” This was the form that was sent to us after we called Customer Service to ask for it. (Since it wasn’t packed with the laptop.)

Shortly thereafter, we received a card with the following comments:

We DID send the packing slip. However, unlike the rebate form, it must have been “lost in the mail.” After Richard’s warning, however, we had taken the precautions to make a copy, which we sent off immediately.

Shortly thereafter, we received another card:

After a phone call to customer service, my husband managed to “clear things up,” and we were assured we would be a couple hundred bucks richer in the near future.

A little after mid-September, we received another card:

Another phone call yielded the astounding news that we had sent the wrong rebate form. Of course this was the rebate form that customer service had sent to us upon request. My husband is a patient man (the reason he was doing the calling and not I.) He downloaded and filled out a new form and resubmitted it along with yet another copy of the packing slip and receipt.

A little later, my husband checked the Website rebatestatus.com. When he input our customer account and order number, he found the following message:

After more phone calls, on 9/26 and 10/16, we began to see positive messages on rebatestatus.com.

On 11/10/02, we received the message:

An April 10, 2003 column online at MSNBC.com featured “Motley Fool” Jeff Fisher asking the question “Are rebates scandalous? Complaints about faulty or bogus offers mount.” Mr. Fisher comments:

Mr. Fisher describes some of his own experiences with rebate-seeking, which space does not allow us to cover here. But you already have a good idea of what his experiences were.

Mr. Fisher goes on to relate that most rebates are handled by rebate processing organizations on behalf of manufacturers and retailers, and some consumers theorize that these organizations are given incentives by clients to deny or not fulfill as many rebates as possible. Mr. Fisher says it sounds like an inverse reward system:

I have another theory regarding the purpose of rebates. Most rebates require the ORIGINAL purchase receipt and the UPC code from the package. Once you send these items off, if your product quits working, you would be hard pressed to find a retailer that would accept a return.

Mr. Fisher suggests that you