I miss Fry's Electronics, but they were definitely a practitioner of "free after rebate" and other rebate-based discount schemes where they took your money up f

I miss Fry's Electronics, but they were definitely a practitioner of "free after rebate" and other rebate-based discount schemes where they took your money up front and claimed that you would get some of it back from some third party sometime in the future. In spite of the obviously scammy nature of such promotions, I still took the bait a few times, averaging probably a 50% rebate success rate - somewhat better than I would have predicted. At some point there was a web site where you could check your rebate status, which seemed to help a bit.