The Verizon computer nearly tricked Joshua out of a $100 rebate with some mathematical Three-Card Monte, but he made like a human calculator and stood firm, arguing his way into getting the fair price.

By keeping track of the rebates he had coming to him, as well as the adjusted prices of one of his devices after a $100 credit, he was able to snag two Android phones on the cheap. His story:

Today we picked up two Droids at the Verizon store; we’re longtime customers and I have a $100 credit for a new phone. The deal is buy a $300 Droid 2 and get a $100 mail in rebate and buy any other phone of the same value for free. So we picked a $300 Droid X ($200 after its own mail in rebate) as the free phone.

You would think that with this math, that would mean we would be given $200 in mail-in rebates, get charged $300 plus taxes (the $100 “free” Droid X, the $300 Droid 2 minus the $100 customer credit), but you’d be wrong. The Verizon system insisted I would be charged $400 plus taxes. Essentially, the Droid 2 with my $100 credit would put it below the price of the Droid X, which would then be considered of greater value and hence costing $200 and not “free”.

Basically, my $100 credit was being consumed and ignored.

I had to explain the correct math to the employee and after five minutes of back-and-forth number juggling he understood it and had to work through the system to fix the problem, but I really think the system should have handled this correctly in the first place.

If you’ve partaken in Verizon’s rebate promotions, did anything like this happen to you?

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