This is exceedingly common. I've filled out a lot of rebate forms over the
past few years. I recently had a rebate for a 300GB Seagate HD
invalidatedI firmly believe that they just randomly select x% of rebates
to invalidate without cause in hopes of keeping a few dollars. In this case,
I simply called the number provided by the invalid notice, and she gave me
the rebate with no hassles.
The company that is providing a rebate never actually processes those
rebates. There are a handful of large rebate processing centers around the
nation...some are mediocre, and the others are worse. These sorts of issues
are usually more closely correlated to the rebate clearing center than the
company that issued the rebate offer.
Now to go a little off topic, I'm not happy with Norton's consumer grade
products in recent years. They seem to cause more problems than they solve,
and I've had a lot of machines come in riddled with viruses that have been
running Norton AntiVirus with a functioning automatic update. I don't fully
understand it though, because Norton's enterprise-grade products, like
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate, is second to none.
The key thing to remember when dealing with rebates, though, especially if
they initially reject you, is that persistence will almost always get you
the money in time. You did make copies before you sent everything off,
didn't you?
Greg
- Original Message -
From: Robert Turnbull [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com
Sent: Sunday, July 03, 2005 2:33 PM
Subject: [H] Norton - Bloody Norton!
I have read that it is a common rebate practice for some companies to deny
a rebate claim in the expectation that the customer will not bother
further. I did not expect that Symantec Corporation (whose products I have
bought for years) would be in this category, and I am dismayed to find
that it is.
This is clearly a dishonest business practice.
I wrote to Norton rebate office to that affect with a copy to the
President in Cupertino and also to the SEC in Washington (which should be
interested in dishonest business practices but probably isn't outside of
the securities field).
I'll let the list know what transpires.
