My favorite guarantee or warranty is the lifetime one. Sometimes they call it a guarantee. Sometimes they call it a warranty. What I have always wanted to know is: Whose life? I’ve had a variety of answers. Some of them were stupid. One salesman told me that the guarantee was for the life of the thing I was buying. I told him that didn’t make any sense. I explained that if the guarantee was good for the life of the thing I was buying then it wasn’t any guarantee at all. He called me “mister” and said I could look at it any way I wanted but it was a lifetime guarantee. It did not appear to be a conversation worth pursuing. Another salesperson said the warranty was good for the life of the purchaser. I asked if I could have my kid buy it. He just looked at me but the look said, “What does that have to do with the warranty?” I wanted to point out that if I bought it the manufacturer was on the hook for maybe twenty years but if a twenty year-old bought it the hook was solid for maybe sixty or sixty-five years. I didn’t. It seemed self-evident. But the apparent oddity of this possibility didn’t faze him. His look now said, “So?”

These experiences have brought me to the view that a lifetime guarantee or a lifetime warranty is either a ruse or an absurdity or both. But it does have a ring to it. It sounds like you are buying something that lasts forever or, at least, all the forever you’ll ever need. And it makes the six month, one year, two year or five year warranty sound flimsy. If it’s anything less than a lifetime warranty, you gotta think that the item is slated to disintegrate shortly after the warranty expires. Six months? Are you kidding? You mean to tell me this thing will be good for six months and then I’m on my own?

Sears’ line of Craftsman hand tools have a lifetime warranty. I think they should call it an infinite warranty. But somehow, somewhere, someone decided that lifetime warranty sounds better than infinite warranty. I’m telling you that something happens to the Craftsman hammer your Dad passed on to you that he got from his Dad and you can take it into Sears and they will give you a new one. No questions. No receipt. You don’t even have to say you bought it. You could have found it in the street. Now that’s a warranty.

The apparent absurdity of a lifetime warranty is old school. There is something elegantly deceptive about it. The newer scams are not elegant. But they are frustratingly clever. Take mail-in rebates.

Mail-in rebates belong to a class of scams that rely on flaws in human character backed-up by insanely technical rules. I doubt if the percentage of mail-in rebates that are paid rises above a single digit. And this is clearly the objective. It was genius to see that if you expose consumers to their own laziness, their own forgetfulness, their own impatience and a set of absurdly complicated instructions, you will avoid having to pay them much of anything. For the overwhelming majority who buy that $100 item with the $30 mail-in rebate because the price will only be $70 the price ends up being $100.00. Let me ask just this: Once you have cut precisely the right piece of the box off and completed the little form that was attached to your receipt and timely mailed it to exactly the right address what is it that could possibly take six weeks to process? And for the few, the persistent, the determined who go through all this the reward is a credit card worth $30. It wouldn’t be cheaper to send a check? Sure it would. But if you don’t lose the little credit card and you don’t forget that you have it there’s still a good chance that you will use it to buy something that only costs $25. And you’ll probably forget about the other $5. The check you would just cash and get the full $30.

The beauty of the mail-in rebate is that you will have no one to blame but yourself. Your submission was not timely because you waited a few days to send it in and the deadline that no one brought to your attention has passed. Your submission was incomplete because you failed to cut the entire piece off the box as instructed. Your submission was rejected because you failed to include the rebate code when addressing your envelope. Of course most of the time you never hear anything. And you failed to note the end of the six week period on your calendar. By the end of six weeks you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. And if some day you remember it, you’ll probably just say: Hey, I wonder whatever happened to that rebate? By then you won’t know who to call or who to write. And anyway, the warranty on the item you bought will have expired and the item will have broken down. You’ll be watching for a good price on a replacement. When you find one, it will be $40 off the full price with a mail-in rebate.