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Have you ever seen an advertised special in a store that seemed like a great price, only to find out that the advertised price was effective only after you received a mail-in rebate? How did you feel about that? If you are anything like most people, it didn’t phase you much. You probably thought, Well bottom line is if I get some money back in the mail which makes the item only cost that much, then that’s the price I can buy it for. But there is still that little asterisk in your brain about the discounted price, isn’t there? Somehow you know this isn’t quite like buying it at that advertised price.
After all you still do have to fork over all the money now and wait for a rebate to arrive, and there is at least a tinge of doubt in your mind that you will actually receive it. And for good reason! Retailers are getting worse and worse about honoring these rebate offers. They are looking for any excuse not to honor them and some of them go to ridiculous lengths to weasel out of their obligation. They make you dot a hundred i’s and cross and hundred t’s on three or four forms, send in a critical part of the packaging plus a printed receipt, and if you slip up on some minor point you blew it – no rebate.
Now, understand that just because you missed something on the form or sent the wrong part of the packaging in, the company doesn’t really doubt that you purchased the item. They can see just from the receipt alone that you are a legitimate customer. There is pretty much no chance that somebody is trying to scam them out of an unearned rebate. They know this. They are just trying to find a loophole – any loophole – to dishonor the price they advertised the item for. Electronics companies are especially notorious for doing this nowadays.
If you do somehow clear the obstacle course, you are likely to receive a prepaid visa debit card which you must spend at retail establishments in order to redeem. What’s more, if you don’t do it pretty quick the thing will expire and you will lose the rebate. It’s not cash. It’s not a check you can deposit in your bank account. It can’t go into your savings account, cannot go into your kid’s college fund, cannot practically be given to your favorite charity. You have to use it at a store or a restaurant in order to redeem it. And you won’t get it for many weeks, possibly months after you mail in the required forms.
This still all might seem OK to you. After all, you live in this society and so you are out spending money in stores quite often, and even the grocery store will accept that prepaid debit card. But let me tell you a considerable percentage of those cards expire without being used. They go into a purse pocket or a drawer and you find them in 8 months expired and worthless. You didn’t get the advertised price. As a matter of fact there is a good chance that as you are reading this some Christmas present you purchased a couple months ago cost you more than you planned on. Because right now, that rebate card is lost somewhere, if you even remembered to sit down for 30 minutes and figure out the claiming process in the first place.
What this all adds up to is terribly misleading marketing, if not blatant false advertising. It’s amazing that it is still legal. When Mama Riah and I purchased new cell phones recently the girl at the store told us to make sure we didn’t put the rebate claim forms in the same envelope or we would only get one of them. Now isn’t that utterly ridiculous, even perhaps borderline criminal? We should all get together as a society and just say no to any product advertised with a mail-in rebate price. Either that or start a massive class-action lawsuit.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: advertising, rebates, scam
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…in California anyway. This is kind of a weird state. We legalize things that are illegal in the United States of America. Yet we are one of those United States. That is something I cannot understand. How can a state legalize something that is not legal in the country? President Obama recently made a plea for Federal drug enforcement agencies to stop “raiding” the California marijuana dispensaries. The ones that the state of California allows to be established and operate. The same ones that are illegal to exist anywhere in the United States of America. Seriously, civil wars start over this kind of stuff. Maybe that is what President Obama is wanting to avoid? Or is just a bone that he is throwing to the liberals who elected him?
Those of you who don’t live in California might wonder how these marijuana dispensaries work. You might have visions in your head of a drive-through window where Cheech and Chong pull up in their smoky van and hand a note from their mother in exchange for pot. Truth be told, the reality isn’t that much different.
I have had the unfortunate opportunity to learn all about it firsthand this week, as my father (in his late 60’s) decided he would see how difficult the process was in an attempt to help his insomnia. Let me tell you, when you go visit your parents and your Dad shows you his bong, nothing can surprise you anymore. That is the end of being shocked or dismayed in this life. A pink walrus could dance through my living room and pass out lollipops, and I wouldn’t think anything of it now.
The first thing he had to do was go to a marijuana-prescribing doctor. This is as simple as opening up the phone book or doing a quick internet search. You make an appointment and when you show up you say you have trouble sleeping and you are wondering if marijuana would help. The doctor tells you yes it might and scribbles you a note (known medically as a prescription) and off you go. The doctor visit might take 10 or 15 minutes.
Now comes the interesting part. You have to go to a marijuana dispensary. The doctor probably recommended one to you, and hopefully he gave you very precise directions – including the secret door knock. They are located in unmarked buildings, no signs, and usually no address numbers visible. New customers are given the color of the building, which donut shop it is across from, and which unmarked door to go through.
Assuming you can find the place, you get in line behind high school boys who better not ever show up asking for your daughter, toothless truck stop waitresses, and tattooed bikers. When it’s your turn you hand them the note, empty your wallet (the stuff is way more expensive than you remember from your misspent youth), and leave with a pill bottle stuffed with the choicest U.S. Government grade buds. Interesting that the same U.S. government which outlaws the dispensary is growing and processing the marijuana – and somehow allowing them to get a hold of it and distribute it before they raid them.
So, that’s it. Anybody can get it. Kids who get diagnosed with ADD or ADHD (the biggest sham in America) get subscriptions for it. The marijuana doctors are in the marijuana prescribing business and are not too picky about your particular health complaint. Cancer? Here you go. Have trouble sleeping sometimes? Here ya go. Elbow pain? Here ya go. We have lived to see the day and age where marijuana is legalized. I never would have guessed this as a teenager when the cops kept confiscating my pot.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: legal marijuana, society
By admin
A CEO for a company that posted record losses for a quarter was recently asked why he gave himself a large bonus in an interview. His reply was: Because I deserve it. This statement was a real eye-opener. It should have all of us suddenly waking up to the utter scam that business schools are pulling on publicly-owned companies. A recession is a good time to examine this stuff and attempt to put a stop to it. Why did the young CEO of think he deserved a large bonus after his company was putting up the worst numbers in it’s history? It has nothing to do with how good of a job he is doing. It’s because he dropped $150,000 on a long education and now has issues of entitlement.
The scary thing is, you can’t really blame him! This is what they taught him in business school. Finish school, graduate, find a struggling publicly-owned company to get a top executive job at, and siphon off a million dollar salary for yourself. Man, they must be sitting around laughing in business school at this prospect. All you need is a Harvard MBA and you have a license to legally embezzle ridiculous amounts of money with no accountability. This makes skimming the Tangiers casino (in the movie Casino) look like child’s play.
Remember the late 1980’s movie Wall Street? Think back to Gordon Gekko’s speech to the Teldar Paper stockholder meeting. His main beef was that there was no accountability to upper management because they had no stake in the company. They are just there to rape and pillage motivated purely by self-interest. Don’t you find it interesting that the failing big three auto company CEO’s all flew private jets to go ask the federal government for taxpayer bailout money a few month’s ago?
Sadly, this is the way corporate America works. Business owners who start and grow the company, whose passion fuels it’s initial success, are pretty much long gone by the time a company is actively traded in the stock market. Venture capital firms take an early partnership in the company, help it grow, and then when the IPO happens everybody gets out rich. The new stockholders elect of board of directors who hire new officers for the company and that’s where these bright-eyed kids graduating from business school come in. They walk out of school into contracts that most professional athletes would drool over, with zero experience in business and no passion for this particular business (oftentimes without having any industry knowledge whatsoever).
The lesson to be learned here is two-fold. If you are a college kid reading this, go get a business graduate-school education from a top university. The recession will be over by the time you graduate and you can get in on this scam. Otherwise, start a new business that will capture the interest of venture capitalists. Work it for a couple years, build it up and get out rich when the IPO goes live. So there are two ways to take advantage of the American dream by exploiting loopholes in our system. Or perhaps exploiting loopholes in our system is the American dream.
Papa Riah
Technorati Tags: business, recession
Have you ever seen an advertised special in a store that seemed like a great price, only to find out that the advertised price was effective only after you received a mail-in rebate? How did you feel about that? If you are anything like most people, it didn’t phase you much. You probably thought, Well bottom line is if I get some money back in the mail which makes the item only cost that much, then that’s the price I can buy it for. But there is still that little asterisk in your brain about the discounted price, isn’t there? Somehow you know this isn’t quite like buying it at that advertised price.
