Our journey today begins in 2003 — April 1, 2003, to be exact. That day marked the day purchasers of optical disk drives (think “desktop computers” and “DVD players” and “CD players” and various gaming platforms like PlayStation) became eligible for inclusion in a class-action suit against manufacturers of those disk drives.
The period of eligibility lasted for nearly five years. In 2010, the class-action suit was filed. If you purchased an optical disk drive, or a device containing one during the five-year time span, you became part of that class action. The manufacturers were alleged to have colluded on prices for the drives.
If you were a reader of this column, you may have filed a claim. I wrote about the suit soon after it was filed, and updated its progress in 2016 and 2019. The window to file claims for the purchases ended in 2019.
Now here we are — 12 years after the file date — and I can report that the check …
… is not in the mail. No, dear put-upon consumer. No check for you.
Your settlement comes in the form of a gift card.
Out of a $205 million settlement, I am due $11.42.
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The law firms involved in the settlement did far better, with something north of $42 million set aside for their troubles.
I was notified this week by email that I had a settlement amount waiting, and it must be claimed by July 19, or I will lose claim to it and it will be distributed among other claimants in the case.
There are four options for taking the settlement. A check or direct deposit is not among them: Amazon egiftcard, Target egiftcard, Starbucks egiftcard or Mastercard digital debit card.
As it turns out, when the claim form was filled out years ago, there was an option to get a check or digital payment. Many filers evidently picked digital payment, thinking it would be in the form of direct deposit into a checking account. Alas, it was not to be.
If you don’t shop at the three aforementioned places, you’re out of luck — although it would be hard to imagine a consumer who didn’t go to one of the three over a year’s time. Those people exist, nonetheless. And so do people who really don’t want a debit card — digital or otherwise.
But those are the options.
It took more than a decade to get back some of the money paid out for an over-priced optical disk drive. After all those years, it would have been nice to have had some tangible dollar bills. As it is, it’s not over yet: There are egiftcards to be redeemed.
And as I said several years ago when I last wrote about the “Dollars for Disk Drives” class-action: “Try not to spend the check (or in this case, the egiftcard) all in one place.”
Lonnie Brown can be reached at LedgerDatabase@aol.com.
