Rebate update

Wow, it's been over three years since I penned my September 2006 Observations, "The Tipping Point -- The End of Rebates". With the promise to "check back" on the situation, Rick Broida's "Cheapskate Blog" and today's post, "The state of rebates: Has reliability improved?", prompted be to go back and look. (BTW check back on that blog as the comments mount up.)

While in 2006 I was speculating on the potential demise of the Mail-in Rebate (MIR) at least for the printer industry, a quick survey indicates they are indeed seriously on the wane. A look at techbargains.com and their ten most recent printer "deals" shows a MIR required for only two of them, veritable "Outliers" these day!

Here's the data from my unscientific but interesting study:

Comments

Ben Smith said…
I believe the retailers drove the rebate trend more than the manufacturers. They liked keeping the high ring but at a low net price they could advertise to consumers.. Of course consumers hate mail-in rebates and they cause customer service issues for retailers - so one by one they started moving to instant rebates. Instant rebates pretty much negated any financial incentive on the manufacturer side. So we are left with the standard of Temporary Price Reductions (TPR) today.
12:44 PM
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