Bloggers bid good riddance to the mail-in rebate

It's one of life's little annoyances, particular if you're a frequent buyer of consumer electronics: the mail-in rebate. First you have to read and re-read the fine print. Then you need to hold tight to and appropriately fill out exactly the right paperwork by a certain deadline. And then there's the anxiety-ridden wait to hear via snail mail if you made the right offering to the rebate gods.

We go through it, of course, to save money or justify a higher-end product, but all the while wonder whether the discount is worth all the hassle.

Well all that may soon be a thing of the past now that OfficeMax has followed Best Buy's lead in doing away with mail-in rebates due to customer dissatisfaction.

Bloggers, who have very little nice to say about mail-in rebates, see the news as progress for consumers.

Blog community response:

"Now we just need to get Staples, Circuit City, and any other big stores to end their programs. Mail-in rebates are all a sham to make products look more attractive while they gain interest on your money."
--Jasonblogs

"Starting this weekend, there will be no more purchases to be proofed, receipts to be scrounged from trashcan depths, or nail-biting as your bets fail on the misbegotten hope that your rebate check will arrive in time to keep your checks from bouncing."
--The Consumerist

"The ancient Greeks called them simply 'Stoola,' but the classical Romans knew mail-in rebates as 'Wasta Timus,' scraps of worthless papyrus to be ritually incinerated at the Why Botherum dedicated to their household Gods."
--The American Erewhon-ist

"After purchasing my last piece of computer hardware, which offered a rebate, I firmly decided to never go through that hassle again. The entire point of the rebate is to save the manufacturer money, not you. Rather than lowering the price, which guarantees everyone wins, they offer a rebate fully realizing that a significant portion of buyers will either neglect to send it in, or worse yet, will be denied due to some asinine detail in the fine print, such as what happened to me."
--Technology Review Central