5/31/2011

not you too macmall

In the increasingly bizarro world of mail-in rebates, MacMall has set a new bar.

Not only is the rebate itself dependent upon people not sending it in, but the next 'obvious' hurdle in the business model that views customers as idiots and employees as expendable is to simply make a policy of denying payments to people who do send in the rebate forms. The reject letter they mail doesn't even have order info to be able to call to complain; you have to look that up separately from your records.

Then when you do call, their poor customer service reps are obligated to maintain the farce that you aren't eligible for the rebate.

It's not until you ask if this is a standard business practice (or yell, or whatever gets through the script to the next response) that they consent and process the rebate. I had specifically emailed MacMall customer service about this precise rebate issue to ensure that there wasn't going to be a problem surrounding the new iMac release.

This is how one-off scammers and shady businesses do things, not legitimate companies that expect repeat business. This must be relatively new, because the last time I ordered I had to submit several different rebates, but at least they processed the ones I submitted.

Part of me wonders if sometime in the not-too-distant future basically every good we buy will simply be shipped from Amazon. Among other things, what interests me personally the most is that it's just dumb business. Instead of being mad at Apple for the delay in shipping the iMac, my memory of the shopping part of this experience will now be MacMall making it painful to do business with them.

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