I  hit the roof yesterday when I found out that we had missed the deadline to apply for the promised $100 rebate on my son’s fancy cell phone. To make myself feel better, I checked with Consumers Reports and some other sources: sure enough, the Marshalls are not alone. It is estimated that 40%-60% of all rebates go unclaimed, to the tune of 4 billion dollars. What a deal for retailers! They lure you to the store with low prices. When you get there, you discover that the price will only truly be low after you mail in a rebate request and get a check in return. But you’re in the store, and have made the emotional commitment to buy. Later, you may find out that the various hoops you have to jump through to get the rebate back are annoying and time-consuming, and easy to botch. If you are busy, you may put it aside—and ninety, sixty, thirty, or even just seven days later, the rebate offer expires.

Are rebates ethical, or are they a particularly insidious form of consumer fraud, using the well-document human characteristics of impulse buying, inattention to detail, short attention span and procrastination against consumers to make millions of dollars in money that was supposed to be discounted but never was?

I am too full of self-loathing to declare that the retailer was at fault for my lost rebate. I knew the difference between the discount price and the price I paid when I charged it. I had all the paperwork (intentionally confusing as it was), and I’m a lawyer; if I couldn’t decipher it, it’s my own fault. (For a seventh grade drop-out, it might be a different story.) The rebate is manipulative, but it’s a sales technique and a clever one, and most of all, I knew how it worked when I fell for it. There was no dishonesty or misrepresentation that I can blame. If I think rebates are too baroque and full of traps, then I shouldn’t choose to buy on the basis of the rebated price, that’s all. It’s all under my control. It’s just that my son reeeeeeeally wanted that phone…

Now I learn from National Public Radio that New Jersey is proposing legislation to make retailers responsible for getting the rebate. “Customers should not be deceptively lured into stores by low prices that only exist after they take the product home, cut apart the packaging, fill out aggravating paperwork and then wait weeks or months for a check,” said New Jersey Assemblyman John Burzichelli. The new law working its way through the legislature, (A-1692), would mandate that retailers advertising a product’s “net price” — the cost after a manufacturer’s rebate is applied — would be required to charge that price at the time of sale. It then would be a retailer’s responsibility to complete the rebate redemption process. New Jersey would become the third state to enforce such a consumer protection, joining Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Rand Paul, I suspect, would have a lot of problems with that law, and maybe I would too. If the retailer only advertises the lower price without referencing the rebate, then the law is a good one: the necessity of paying the full price and then applying for the rebate is a material difference from what has been advertised, and making the retailer responsible for getting the money back then is fair, as well as an incentive for full disclosure in ads. But if such a law required retailers to do the redeeming in all rebate offers, all that would happen is that stores would stop offering rebates. It is a little like the situation with grocery store coupons. Those who use them get discounts, and those of us who don’t use them end up paying more as a result. Is this unfair? No, it’s not: we can use the coupons if we choose to endure the trouble of clipping, saving and using, just as we can jump through all the rebate hoops and get our request out within the deadline. The government shouldn’t have to protect us from our own laziness, carelessness and procrastination. It should protect us from misrepresentation, lies, fraud, and bait-and switch scams.

There are a lot of those being used in rebate deals too. Consumer experts warn us to avoid…

• Companies that don’t provide consumers at least 30 days to redeem their rebates, and who don’t fulfill the terms of the rebate within the same amount of time required of consumers, not exceeding 60 days.

• Companies that don’t send rebate checks in packaging identifying the piece of mail as the expected rebate check.

• Companies that do not accept copies of receipts.

• Companies requiring consumers to write identifying information on the rebate form (unless the receipt does not identify the purchased product).

• Companies offering rebates that require information not necessary to process the rebate, other than name, address and phone number.

• Companies that fail to provide telephone numbers or contact information for rebate inquiries so consumers are able check on the status of their rebates.

• Companies that condition the rebate on additional purchases or service commitments.

The Verizon rebate that I missed  had some of these questionable features. To get it, I had to agree to a two-year sevice agreement that would have cost over eighty dollars in total, meaning that the $100 rebate was really more like twenty bucks. Incredibly, Verizon would take up to eight months to process the rebate, which is more than long enough for me to forget about it. None of these were exactly hidden from me when I made the purchase, but I had to take the trouble to look for them. They are also bad conditions, making my purchase a bad deal for me. It isn’t unethical, however, to offer a bad deal, if the terms are fully disclosed.

Outright fraud and misrepresentation aside, the ethical burden in rebate purchases resides with the consumer. If one can successfully get a rebate in the time promised by a retailer by following a disclosed procedure, no matter how needlessly complicated, within a reasonable period of time, then nobody is being deceived, then the arrangement passes the ethics test. Consumers who fall victim to their own human frailties shouldn’t blame the stores for offering rebates. They should blame who they see in the mirror for accepting a deal they should know isn’t as good as they’d like it to be.