>The mail-in rebate.
>
>What's the point? I don't understand how so many companies manage to get their customers to give them a loan, interest free (even less than so-called 0% APR, because that includes the official rate, just zero above it), and they even manage to use this dirty trick as a great advertising bait for the customers. And they actually don't have to have the money to give back, they just use the next su... customer's loan to pay the old loans. So that's free money for the manufacturer, and I just wonder how does that money go through accounting. Must be interesting.
>
>Who's stupid here? Me, for not understanding the fine points of doing commerce here, or?

I buy stuff that comes with a rebate when the price without the rebate is competitive, which it generally is anyway. Once or twice, I have succeeded in "winning the game" by actually getting some money sufficient to make it worth the trouble. I think it was a hard drive from Maxtor.

Trak Auto used to sell a lot of auto parts with mail-in rebates that would bring the price down to, or near, $0. But the card for that part might not be in the store. If you mail the card and stuff (to some tiny town in West Texas where the mail might take longer to arrive and the fulfillment company workers don't need to be paid much), you will likely forget that you have a check for $3 coming in 12 weeks, and certainly won't sue if you remember that it didn't come.

Iomega lost a legal judgement about their ZIP drive rebates, which would have been big enough for people to miss. I don't know what their customers/plaintiffs received. They said that the response to the rebate was larger than expected and their fulfillment company wasn't getting things done.