I loathe rebates.
The idea that some company is going to send you money back if you buy their product just bugs the crap out of me. It doesn't make economic sense for the buyer and to me it always makes the company look greedy and dumb.
After all everyone knows that the company A. will never give enough away in rebates so as to lose money on the deal and B. they count on most people never applying for the rebate.
I mean, if you want to offer a discount offer a discount. If you want to give me a Visa gift card for buying your product then give me a Visa gift card at the point of sale.
Which brings me to ATT. I switched over all of my services to ATT a few months back and the saleslady told me I would get a $100 rebate. I didn't ask for it but she went through the process and told me how to get it. So, I filled out the form, attached the receipts put it in the mail and then ... nothing. For weeks, nothing.
Finally, I called ATT, and we did a little dance. The lady on the other end said something was wrong in processing and that I needed to call someone in sales and have that person call her back with me on the line to get the rebate approved.
So I called the other number but it was too late, they were closed. I called again the next day, got the right lady to call the other lady who, without much explanation, said everything was OK now and she would be sending my rebate forthwith.
And then ... nothing. Nothing for weeks.
Finally, I went to the only option I had left, I complained on Twitter.
"I'm still waiting on a $100 rebate the the nice customer service lady promised I would get quickly 4 months ago," I tweeted.
Then I added:
"That last tweet should have included #attfail"
That day I got a response on Twitter from ATTJessica. As you might have guessed ATTJessica works for ATT. She wanted to help. I sent her some information about the situation and she promised to find out what happened. Different people from ATT called me every day or every other day for about week, telling me they were working on my problem.
Finally, someone left me a voicemail that said, ummm, we sent it to the wrong address because we had the wrong address on file. And also, were you getting mail from us?
I assured them I was getting mail from them but I had noticed, in conversations with various ATT people that from time to time they had the wrong address and each time I told them the right address and was told that it was fixed.
My guess is that it was fixed, it just wasn't fixed at the rebate center.
Anyway, the rebate came this weekend. ATT threw in some extra money because they felt bad.
Amber and I spent it all on groceries.
Yaaaay.
