Saw a commercial for the "Q-Ray" on television earlier today, and it always grabs my interest it's so ridiculous ("oooh, an ionized bracelet!"). One thing that especially caught my eye this time was the scammy wording of several of the segments, for instance (and I'm paraphrasing, so take this as satire and go watch the commercial yourself if you care enough) "For $19.95 (+shipping and handling) get your Q-Ray 30-day trial only!". Now this little piece of braided wire seems to be a ripoff at $19.95, but their deceptive wording made my wife and I curious. So much so, that she dialed the 1-800 number, and we learned that it's $19.95 (+s&h), and if you don't return it within 30 days it's two more installments of $50+ (again, I didn't care enough to really catalog it in my braincells accurately, so call if you really want more specifics). I'm sure the return-within-30-days thing is about as easy as getting a rebate check, though the weak of mind that orders this sort of garbage will likely attribute every positive event in their life to the magical ionization, and thus happily fork over another $100 plus..

Speaking of ripoffs, what's the deal with instant rebates? I understand the concept behind mail-in rebates (which in a nutshell is that many customers don't bother to mail it in from the get go, and of those who do you can get rid of many of their claims just by ignoring them, conveniently losing material, and so on. Pretty clever use of fraud to compliment legitimate retail), but I fail to see who the winner is in a scheme where 100% of the customers get the savings immediately at check-out. What I suspect is that it's an accounting trick - sell a $200 item for $300 + $100 instant rebates, and then put a $300 sale on the books, and a $100 expense. Sales then are bloated, although the profit percentage has decreased. Corner stores should hop on this idea, selling chocolate bars for $10,000 - $9,999.01 rebates, chocking up record breaking sales quarter over quarter.

On the theme of lame adverts and sales techniques, another source of irritation are car leasing ads that put gigantic monthly leasing values ("$299/month. You read it right! $299!"), and then absurdly hide the down payment portion in tiny text at the bottom: The first value is pretty much meaningless without the second -- you could lease a Mercedes S600 for a pittance per month if you just put $120,000 down. Car companies think they're being clever with this sort of lowest-common-denominator advertising, but the end result is that all car ads become nothing but noise, with a bunch of meaningless, context-free random values on them.