Assembly Bill 1673

The cell phone market is one of the most competitive fields in the United States with a multitude of well-known and relative start up brands that want to compete for your service.
Being that it is so cut throat will little distinctions among brands and phone types the fate of a company can usually be determined by its market and advertising strategy which has in many cases has concentrated on three main things – comedic appeal, phone services/options and price.
Usually in most cases the price is the final lure that attracts the customer into the store hoping to take advantage of the current deal – a current deal that is boldly misleading.
Take for example Mr. Smith who has finally decided on a choice among the swift and quick-closing great-whites of the sales floor and has since moved onto the checkout register cash registered.
Upon receiving his bill Mr. Smith does a double take as the cash registered tells him the price of his purchase is over a third more than he anticipated. He looks over the receipt and points out that the price of the phones purchased is more than the advertised price, prompting the sales clerk to say, “To get the advertised price you have to send in the mail back rebate for all your phones.”
Although Mr. Smith is displeased with having to pay more for a product up front than he originally thought he has already committed himself to the product and will have to take the price with a grain of salt and hopefully remember to send in the mail back rebate. But most importantly Mr. Smith’s confidence in the sales pitch of commercial products has been shattered and has left his wallet lighter than expected.
Scenarios such as this, where customers go into a phone store believing the actual price is less than the one that they’ll actually have to pay may be a thing of the past if the Assembly Bill 1673 by D-Los Angeles Mike Feuer is signed by Governor Schwarzenegger.
If passed the bill would offer the stores the choice of advertising the higher price or “honor the rebate immediately and seek reimbursement themselves.”
Feuer and other state legislatures that are supporting the bill are saying this is “fundamentally a truth-in-advertising bill,” and that “the consumer should pay the advertising bill.”
I say this is just a bunch of hot-air and wasted amount of state legislative time that is purportedly aimed at protecting the precious consumer.
First off when you buy into a promotional gimmick as a consumer you should have already realizedl that the price somehow involves a gimmick and if you don’t, then your easy money anyways and if it wasn’t this is would surely be some other gimmick that you would spend your money on.
Phone sales people depend on this sort of curiosity among customers and with each company doing the same thing the competiion is still even and eventually if the consumer takes the time to file a rebate they too will benefit through this process.
I agree that most people would rather not deal with this sort of run-around but if the customer goes into a sales floor with the intention of buy a phone, chances are that the customer will also leave with one, however, it might not be their intended price.
This rebate thing has been going on for years and in my eyes has become a subtle agreement between customers and sales floors so why waste the time of Mr. Schwarzenegger with some tedious bill that does nothing but drive away business from hard working sales people in the phone business. This is definitely not content blind and should not be passed.