Marie is in the market for a new external hard drive, and last week (before the Presidents’ Day holiday) she heard from an office Depot employee that just the item she wanted goes on sale frequently, and she should wait for one of those sales. Hurray! That’s just what she did. She waited for a sale, when an “instant rebate” brought the price down…to exactly the same price that it had been.

She sent along this screenshot, and her sad tale:

I’ve been looking for a new Western Digital My Book external harddrive. My current one still works perfectly, but it’s running out of space, so I’m getting a larger one to use as a media server.

I was looking at my local OD, since they’ve given us amazing customer service in the past, and saw that the 3TB size was $149.99, and the 2TB size was $129.99. Talking with one of the employees, he said that they go on sale fairly regularly, and since I’m spending my as-yet-unreceived tax return on it, it wasn’t like I was buying immediately. I checked online, and saw that the prices were the same.

However, with Presidents Day coming up, I figured there might be a sale. I was quite happy to see that there was an instant rebate on both the 2TB and 3TB sizes, of $10 and $20, respectively! Great, right? Oh, wait, but the prices are now $139.99 and $169.99, pre-rebate. That’s right, the prices for the drives have been raised by exactly how much the rebate is, keeping the price the same.

Maybe the rebate happened to come along at the same time Office Depot was adjusting their prices. It’s still annoying, though.

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