Product registration cards

Buy any electronic device and you are likely to find with the warranty card a product registration card. After my wife recently bought a toaster oven she asked me whether she should fill it out and send it in - to make sure she could use its manufacturers warranty if needed.

It is interesting that, either by good placement or how it looks or is worded, people assume they must fill out the product registration card in order to validate their warranty. The top portion does look pretty authentic, asking for the date of purchase, retail store, serial number, model number, name and address and phone number. Then the registration card gets ridiculous, diving right into a survey of what kind of hobbies you enjoy and what magazines you would be most likely to subscribe to.

But if you look closely, somewhere on the card in really fine print (below the other fine print) it says the card has nothing to do with the warranty.

So unless you feel like dishing out your address and phone number so the manufacturer can sell it to a marketing company, throw the product registration card in the trash.