General Complaints
At some big box stores, personal computers are regularly sold with sizable rebates attached, making the advertised price more attractive to buyers. It is common, though, for these rebates to be conditional upon signing a long term contract with a particular ISP, to which some customers may object. Hardware manufacturers have come under fire, also. Dell, for one, has been the subject of rebate complaints involving misprinted receipts, potentially confusing expiration dates, and service representatives who are slow to react.
Rebate issues began to clog Dell's customer service forums, leading the company to shut down that portion of the website, and refocus its energy on new online customer care services. CompUSA used rebates regularly until it started closing its remaining stores in December 2007.
Cell phone service companies, including major players like T-Mobile, as well as third-party retailers like Radio Shack, Wirefly and others have received growing attention due to complex rebate redemption rules. Both carriers and retailers make customers submit rebate claims during a 30-day window, often 6 months after cell phone activation. Some authorized dealers have responded by trying to make rebate requirements more transparent, explaining that the carrier will withdraw payment from them if a customer quits service before the end of the contract.
In 2009, Florida State Attorney General Bill McCollum filed suit against Tiger Direct, OnRebate, and their parent company Systemax, charging the companies with failing to provide rebates to customers.
Read more about this topic: Rebate (marketing)
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or complaints:
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil: I mean acute pain. All other complaints are so considerably diminished by time that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)