The Rebate Rip-off

Apparently, a significant number of rebates are refused for bogus reasons. The use of rebates is based on dishonesty, so we should not be surprised. They are designed so that "slippage" occurs by putting in hurdles which discourage the consumer. Then to make matters worse, some are simply refused for fabricated reasons. This happened to me when I purchased a Fujitsu hard drive from Fry's electronics. Fry's gave me a print out of a rebate receipt, and I sent this in with the original UPC code. It was refused because, the reason given was, it was not purchased within the period of the rebate. Except that according to the Fry's receipt, it was. This happens a lot. Sadly, it hurts the company in the long-run. Sadly, most executives do not get compensated based on long-term customers, only on immediate ones. So executive compensation systems encourage unethical behavior which hurts the company.