DIY Amazon price match guarantee

I just bought a TV antenna from Amazon. (The Winegard MS-2002: amplified, omni-directional HD. I highly recommend it for over-the-air HD/digital TV.) It showed up last week, and I promptly installed it on my roof. Yesterday I happened to see  see that the very same antenna — for which I paid $80.28 — was now selling for $58.99 + tax on Amazon. That's a difference of $16.42; a 20% discount.

So I thought I'd just invoke the Amazon Price Guarantee and get a refund for the difference. However, I couldn't find a link to it on their site. The reason why? They stopped doing this on Sept 1, 2008.

So I did what any consumer who has a strong sense of justice and is slightly crazy would do. I ordered a new one and returned the original.

Shipping the original back is free, and the shipping on the new one is free, too. It'll be a bit of hassle on my part. But I hope that by doing this — and by blogging about it — Amazon realizes how short-sighted it was for them to drop the price guarantee. Granted, most people who would have used the price match guarantee aren't going to be as extreme as me and do the return + re-buy gambit. But for the few of us that do, Amazon is losing money on the transaction by paying for an additional 2 shippings of the product. And that's my lever with them. Make it less economical for them to allow return and re-buy than to simply refund the difference.

So here's my call to action. If you run into a case where Amazon drops the price within the return window, do what I did. Buy a new one and return the old one. And then tell Amazon about it. I'm putting a link to this blog post on Amazon's Get Satisfaction page.