Rebate

I have a habit of imagining boardroom discussions.  It’s my way of calculating what corporations are up to.  Take, for example, the mail-in rebate.  It’s designed to make a product seem cheaper than it actually is. I don’t know what percentage of consumers actually receive these rebates, but marketers do, and it isn’t large.

I usually avoid buying items with rebates, but the other night I stopped into Pioppi’s Liquors for a bottle of gin.  Around the neck was a card that offered me five dollars back.  Normally, in my fogieish indolence, I’d slip the rebate card into a drawer, where I’d discover it after it was out of date and invalid, but I wasn’t going to fall for that this time.

“Where are the envelopes?” I asked Annette, who replied they were in her desk. I couldn’t find them so she got me one.  I seated myself at the kitchen table and got to work.  This was the address to be copied:

CMS Rebate Center,

Attn; Save $5 off Tanqueray:

DIAGEO 1382, PO Box 426014
Del Rio TX 78842-6014

It was four lines with a total of 19 digits to get right, not counting the 5 in $5.   When I’d finished the job, I found I’d skipped the four after DIAGEO.  I squeezed them in, but I could see that the envelope wasn’t going to find its proper destination, even if it arrived at the right PO Box. 

I felt it unwise to pester Annette for another envelope, so I rummaged through her desk until I found one and wrote the address again, triple checking to make sure it was correct. I carefully enclosed my sales slip from Pioppi’s. Then I found a stamp, noting that the net return for my labor would be $4.56 after the expenditure of 44¢. 

Will I be rewarded?  Probably not.  I spent over thirty years in the insurance business where it was part of my job to fill out applications and other forms, but I’m almost never able to score a rebate.  One application was returned to me because Best Buy’s register spit out both a proof of purchase and a sales slip and I’d sent in the wrong thing.  Before I got around to making the correction, the time to respond had expired.  Another time I thought I had everything perfect, but the money never came. 

If the $5 does arrive, I won’t be home free.  It will be in the form of a check, which must be cashed promptly and will be worthless if I don’t get it to the bank in time.  Meanwhile the CMS Rebate Center will have my name and address and know I drink gin.  I will be hearing from someone about that. 

The proper thing would have been to abandon my intended purchase on the counter and inform the clerk that I never buy anything that offers a rebate, hoping the message would scale the heights to the proper boardroom.  The trouble was I was alarmingly low on gin.  When I got home I was faced with the long chance of getting $5 in exchange for one of my wife’s envelopes and a stamp, and I was seized with a sucker’s hope. In six to eight weeks I’ll know if I succeeded or failed.