The RRC Editor’s Blog

The main purpose of Rebate Report Card is to help consumers figure out which rebates are actually a good deal. If you see a rebate for $100 from a company that takes forever to send out the checks and often refuses to pay at all, well, maybe that’s not such a good deal after all. Maybe it would be best to rule out that rebate in your cost calculations.

Currently, the best way to evaluate a rebate offer is to go to the Rebate Report Card search page and put in the name of the store or manufacturer offering the rebate. If the search results are too large, you can narrow down the search by selecting the product category or by choosing to only see how many “A” grades there are, etc.

Sometimes it’s hard to make sense of all that information though. After all, the fact that Company X got a lot of “D” grades might not be such a bad thing, if the average on the website is an “F”. We all know the reports on this site will tend to be slanted toward the negative, just because human psychology doesn’t drive us to report “normal” or “good” experiences as much as the frustrating ones.

So, in the near future, I’ll be improving the site to make it easier to see how any particular company stacks up to the rest of the companies that we know about. I might do this by grading on a curve, or maybe I’ll create some sort of “index” number to show alongside the grades. In any case, it’ll be simple and easy to understand.

If you have other suggestions, please post them over on the message board. Or, use the contact page to send me an idea.

You can expect to see the improved rating system by the end of the year. It would have been nice to get it in before the holiday shopping season, but I’ve been pretty busy applying to law schools lately. I’ll let you know how that goes too.