It's about time:

[Best Buy] also said it will phase out using mail-in rebates over the next two years, bowing to customer complaints. Its shares fell more than 5 percent.

[...]

"Our customers are telling us they just hate the process," General Merchandise Manager Ron Boire said during a conference call to discuss the earnings report.

He described that process as "they send it in, they remain aggravated until they get their check."

The rebates have aggravated regulators, too. Wisconsin consumer protection officials last year looked into the rebates after 89 consumers complained, and Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro sued Best Buy in August in part over complaints about rebates.

I've long suggested that people not factor in mail-in rebates when they purchase an item. Chris reports a 50% recoup rate. Mine was closer to 10%, though that was due in large part to my own carelessness. But even though I rarely buy mail-in rebated goods, their mere existence bugs the living crap out of me.

Let's say that you have a computer on sale for $849.99 with a $50.00 mail-in rebate. The big sign, of course, is going to say $799.99. So you buy the computer with the intention of getting some of your money back. You then take all evidence of the purchase and put it in an envelope. The retailer has a processing center that recieves the envelope and then has a check sent out to your address. These people are essentially being paid to give you money that you just gave them. Except that they've added these steps to the process, paying people along the way.

The question is, why? Companies, theoretically, ought to be in the business of streamlining their operations, not implementing additional steps.

There may be some relatively benign reasons. Maybe they make significant money on the interest between the time they get the money and give it back to you. Maybe they want your address to send you junk mail. That's about as benign as the reasons get. More likely is that they are counting on people like me to fail to get everything together in the same place. They're counting on the mail or a processor to "lose" it. They're counting on people to forget to include one of the items so that the rebate can be denied. They're counting on people to say "Well crud, I just spent $800 on a computer, why should an extra $50 bother me?"

To make a long story short, the people buy the above computer thinking that they're going to pay $799.99 and the retailer is counting that some, probably more than half, will pay $50.00 more than they think they are paying. It's patently dishonest.

Now to a degree I have mixed feelings. People should know better than to trust a company that holds all the cards (evidence of the puchase) to give you money that they don't have to. People should also take the phrase "ain't nuthin' free" to heart. So in a way it's a self-selecting fee for those too lazy to send stuff in or too disorganized to get everything in to them as requested (assuming that the processing centers always get it right, which is a bit generous).

But at the end of the day, I just resent the living heck out of it. I resent the very notion that I have to jump through a succession of hoops just to get the money I just gave them back so that I can get the product for the price as it was advertised.