Wednesday, November 23, 2005
A new kind of rebate hell
It's no secret that rebates are the biggest scam of the twenty-first century. Companies bank on the fact that the majority of people will forget to send them in. Then they'll disqualify a certain percentage of those that do get sent in, based on any technicality they can find. Then they'll wait months to mail the check, earning interest in your money all the while. Some companies won't send it until you've called and complained at least once, in the hopes that most people who did remember to send in the rebate will end up not realizing that they never received it.
So I was pleasantly surprised today to see that my rebate check from Amazon for my new iBook arrived in the mail today without me even having had to pick up the phone once. Sure, it look (a lot) longer than it was supposed to, but the important part is that it acutally showed up. Except the problem is that it didn't all show up. You see, the entire right side of the envelope is missing, apparently having been ripped clean in half by someone or something, somewhere along the line. As is the entire right side of the check.
Wow. What are the odds? Do you know how many pieces of junk mail I receive per day that I wish someone had ripped in half? This was not the one. I can't ever recall in my life having received an envelope in the mail in which the right half of the envelope was simply missing. I was initially tempted to wonder if this might not be some new sort of rebate scam, where they slice off part of the check before mailing it, in one last cheap attempt to keep you from cashing it and get you to give up on it altogether. But seeing as how the portion of the envelope containing the postage is missing, I'm left to conclude that this happened long after the envelope left Amazon's hands, and in fact apparently after it left the post office. I'd go hunt down the mailman and ask him to locate the other piece for me, but it's not like I'd be able to walk into the bank with a check that I've taped back together.
So I'm left to contact Amazon, except that they farm their rebates out to some rebate company. Which I can't conact, because if they did include a phone number on the check, it's not on the half of the check that I actually received. I contacted Amazon anyway (via email, since the world's largest online retailer apparently doesn't have a phone number), but I expect that they'll just tell me to contact the rebate company they've farmed it out to. And since it's clearly the post office's fault, I doubt the rebate company is going to be in any hurry to send me another check. For all I know they'll probably insist that I pay for a stop payment fee on this half a check I received, before they'll be willing to send me a replacement.
I almost never buy anything that has a rebate involved, and it's for precisely this kind of reason. Months after I've purchased something, I don't want to still be playing games and jumping through hoops trying to get me money, that, by all means, the company should have simply deducted from the price they originally charged me. But this nonsense is likely going to drag into 2006 at this rate. It's not the money, it's the aggravation. I've managed to find my way into a new and unique kind of rebate hell, and it wasn't even because anyone was trying to scam me. It was just sheer (or should I say shear?) one-in-a-million bad luck.
Ah well, that's what I get for trying to save a buck. Next time I buy something like this I'll just go pay standard price at a retail store and be done with it.
In any case, Happy Holidays to everyone. Enjoy your turkey, and I'll see you on the other side of the kickoff of the holiday shopping season.
It's no secret that rebates are the biggest scam of the twenty-first century. Companies bank on the fact that the majority of people will forget to send them in. Then they'll disqualify a certain percentage of those that do get sent in, based on any technicality they can find. Then they'll wait months to mail the check, earning interest in your money all the while. Some companies won't send it until you've called and complained at least once, in the hopes that most people who did remember to send in the rebate will end up not realizing that they never received it.
So I was pleasantly surprised today to see that my rebate check from Amazon for my new iBook arrived in the mail today without me even having had to pick up the phone once. Sure, it look (a lot) longer than it was supposed to, but the important part is that it acutally showed up. Except the problem is that it didn't all show up. You see, the entire right side of the envelope is missing, apparently having been ripped clean in half by someone or something, somewhere along the line. As is the entire right side of the check.
Wow. What are the odds? Do you know how many pieces of junk mail I receive per day that I wish someone had ripped in half? This was not the one. I can't ever recall in my life having received an envelope in the mail in which the right half of the envelope was simply missing. I was initially tempted to wonder if this might not be some new sort of rebate scam, where they slice off part of the check before mailing it, in one last cheap attempt to keep you from cashing it and get you to give up on it altogether. But seeing as how the portion of the envelope containing the postage is missing, I'm left to conclude that this happened long after the envelope left Amazon's hands, and in fact apparently after it left the post office. I'd go hunt down the mailman and ask him to locate the other piece for me, but it's not like I'd be able to walk into the bank with a check that I've taped back together.
So I'm left to contact Amazon, except that they farm their rebates out to some rebate company. Which I can't conact, because if they did include a phone number on the check, it's not on the half of the check that I actually received. I contacted Amazon anyway (via email, since the world's largest online retailer apparently doesn't have a phone number), but I expect that they'll just tell me to contact the rebate company they've farmed it out to. And since it's clearly the post office's fault, I doubt the rebate company is going to be in any hurry to send me another check. For all I know they'll probably insist that I pay for a stop payment fee on this half a check I received, before they'll be willing to send me a replacement.
I almost never buy anything that has a rebate involved, and it's for precisely this kind of reason. Months after I've purchased something, I don't want to still be playing games and jumping through hoops trying to get me money, that, by all means, the company should have simply deducted from the price they originally charged me. But this nonsense is likely going to drag into 2006 at this rate. It's not the money, it's the aggravation. I've managed to find my way into a new and unique kind of rebate hell, and it wasn't even because anyone was trying to scam me. It was just sheer (or should I say shear?) one-in-a-million bad luck.
Ah well, that's what I get for trying to save a buck. Next time I buy something like this I'll just go pay standard price at a retail store and be done with it.
In any case, Happy Holidays to everyone. Enjoy your turkey, and I'll see you on the other side of the kickoff of the holiday shopping season.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
The Mac marketshare party, a year and a half later
Thank you, MacMove, for the shout-out. It's funny to see your own words quoted by someone else a year and a half later, and to go back and read it yourself, barely having remembered even reading it. I guess the cool part is that, depending on whose really bad math you believe in the mainstream press lately, there were somewhere roughly about a million Switchers in 2005. If you want to further murder the math, you can extrapolate that there have been maybe another million switchers in each of the previous three years since the Switch campaign began, and so you're looking at somewhere around four million switchers.
Even if you (wrongly) assume that all four million of them switched due to the iPod, it brings up an interesting point. You figure there are at least twenty-five million Windows-using iPod users out there, and if you slap all this incredibly bad math together, there are still twenty-one million iPod users out there who have yet to switch to the Mac. You have to figure each and every one of them is a candidate the next time they decide to buy a new computer. In other words, even through alll this bad math, you should be able to see pretty clearly that this party's just getting started.
The kicker is that the Mac's marketshare numbers are already all happy-looking, with Mac sales growing at 35 to 40 percent per year, roughly three times that of the rest of the personal computer industry. Imagine what these numbers are going to look like once the party really does get started. I know, I've been saying that the party is just getting started for a couple of years now, and it seems like we're always just another mountaintop away from the promised land of Macintosh ubiquity, never quite getting there. But come on, most of you never would have believed that we'd have gotten to a point where the Mac is growing three times as fast as the PC, this quickly if at all.
Progress abounds. And this is going to be a fun holiday season if you're a Mac fan, iPod fan, or both.
Thank you, MacMove, for the shout-out. It's funny to see your own words quoted by someone else a year and a half later, and to go back and read it yourself, barely having remembered even reading it. I guess the cool part is that, depending on whose really bad math you believe in the mainstream press lately, there were somewhere roughly about a million Switchers in 2005. If you want to further murder the math, you can extrapolate that there have been maybe another million switchers in each of the previous three years since the Switch campaign began, and so you're looking at somewhere around four million switchers.
Even if you (wrongly) assume that all four million of them switched due to the iPod, it brings up an interesting point. You figure there are at least twenty-five million Windows-using iPod users out there, and if you slap all this incredibly bad math together, there are still twenty-one million iPod users out there who have yet to switch to the Mac. You have to figure each and every one of them is a candidate the next time they decide to buy a new computer. In other words, even through alll this bad math, you should be able to see pretty clearly that this party's just getting started.
The kicker is that the Mac's marketshare numbers are already all happy-looking, with Mac sales growing at 35 to 40 percent per year, roughly three times that of the rest of the personal computer industry. Imagine what these numbers are going to look like once the party really does get started. I know, I've been saying that the party is just getting started for a couple of years now, and it seems like we're always just another mountaintop away from the promised land of Macintosh ubiquity, never quite getting there. But come on, most of you never would have believed that we'd have gotten to a point where the Mac is growing three times as fast as the PC, this quickly if at all.
Progress abounds. And this is going to be a fun holiday season if you're a Mac fan, iPod fan, or both.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Thank you, Fox News, for the shout-out. Even if it didn't come until the fifteenth paragraph. And even if it was for something as silly as glancing at some numbers and ranking them in order of smallest to largest. You know, you spend all this time toiling on what you consider to be high-quality journalism, and then when the mainstream media finally does give you a shout-out, it's for something as simplistic as this. Oh well, you take it however you can get it, and lately we've been getting plenty of it. iPod Garage has, simply put, become a monster -- and it's the kind of monster that a parent can be proud of.
Been a little while since I've been here, I know. Sorry about that. Been a little busy. Been absolutely deluged with iPod nano accessories this month, with miles to go before that ship sleeps. Speaking of sleep, it's all made me a bit tired. Nothing a good night's sleep won't fix. There are some things to be said about the claim that there were one million Mac switchers in 2005, some things to be said about the fact that another iTunes phone is at the gates already, and some other stuff I'm probably too exhausted to remember. But I need that night's sleep before any of it will make any sense, either in me writing it or you reading it, so I think I'll go take it now.
Been a little while since I've been here, I know. Sorry about that. Been a little busy. Been absolutely deluged with iPod nano accessories this month, with miles to go before that ship sleeps. Speaking of sleep, it's all made me a bit tired. Nothing a good night's sleep won't fix. There are some things to be said about the claim that there were one million Mac switchers in 2005, some things to be said about the fact that another iTunes phone is at the gates already, and some other stuff I'm probably too exhausted to remember. But I need that night's sleep before any of it will make any sense, either in me writing it or you reading it, so I think I'll go take it now.
