Home Depot Rebates suck

Can I just take a moment and whine about Home Depot's rebates? Yeah, it's well known that companies do rebates simply because they know not everyone is going to fill in the right info or even bother to send them in, and odds are they will make money in the end. I have to say that Home Depot does a great job of making their rebate program the biggest pain in the rear possible.

About six months ago I bought a Rigid shop vac for $40, minus a $20 mail-in rebate. I mailed it in, as instructed. A few weeks later I got a letter saying I didn't follow the directions, and failed to include the bar code from the box...the box I threw out at least a week before. Since the box was gone, I had no way of proving that I sent it, even though I remember doing so. I was screwed with that one.

So as part of the renovation we bought several new kitchen cabinets, which resulted in an offer of a $200 rebate. I was very, very careful to follow the directions precisely AND make photocopies of everything AND scan those photocopies into PDF form. After over a month, I thought I would check into the status. Home Depot conveniently has a web page you can go to in order to check on rebate status and, go figure, my $200 rebate wasn't even listed. Oddly enough, the $20 one for the shop vac was. So I then tracked down my paperwork, and emailed Home Depot with the PDF copy of my paperwork. In response, I got a letter saying they couldn't use what I sent them because the scan of the receipt covered over some of the rebate form. Fine, so I re-faxed my original paperwork so they could read everything.

Now, three weeks later, Home Depot's website lists the $200 rebate submission. TWICE. And today I received both a letter in the mail and an email saying "we received your submission, and you have exeeded the maximum number of entries per household. Duplicate submissions cannot be honored." On the web site, one of the two entries has that statement on it, the other says it's still being processed, expected completion another three weeks.

So how come they can take the time to DENY a request, sending a paper letter and an email out, but they need another three weeks to send me my two hundred dollars?

I think I'm gonna start acting like that kid from Better Off Dead, chasing the CEO of Home Depot on my bike with the snow ski attachment, yelling, "I want my two hundred dollars!" the whole way.