A while back (2006, to be exact) Coke started My Coke Rewards, a semi-digital version of those frequent customer reward programs. It’s supposed to be very simple: you buy Coke brand drinks and enter the code under the cap online. Apparently now you can even text the codes in on your cell phone (how delightfully 21st century).
Of course, when I first saw this, I thought, “hey, I’ll save a few caps,” and then promptly forgot to enter the codes online and/or lost the caps. After several repeats of this, I just stopped caring. After all, I reasoned, the promotion will be over before I ever have the chance to collect enough codes to get any of the really good stuff. Now that the program is entering its third year, I’m starting to feel a little stupid. The number of caps I’ve carelessly tossed away is certainly in the hundreds—unique coins I could have been exchanging for goods with actual cash value.
I am left wrestling with a troublesome question: having ignored these pernicious little tokens for so long, dare I begin hoarding them in the hopes that the promotion will last long enough for me to accumulate the points necessary to receive the Coca-Cola® Retro Collapsible Cooler with Plate Set? More importantly, can I even consume 1545 Coke products?
7 responses to “Barrier to Entry”
My friend’s brother started a Facebook group a couple years ago called “Help Me Win a Coke Machine,” to win a replica 50s vending machine for 18,500 points. I think he reached like 5,000 before they stopped offering the machine, so he cashed in for an X-Box or something and gave the top 3 contributors $25 gift cards. True story.
Wow…that’s pretty cool.
“dare I being hoarding them” Interesting.
Personally, looking at the prizes, I see little incentive to participate, especially since I generally refuse to use vending machines as a rule (too expensive for the ‘convenience’) and don’t drink many Coke products.
In my eyes, a more worthwhile promotion is club.live.com. They have more reasonable levels of obtaining prizes, and personally, as an Xbox 360 owner, many of their prizes appeal to me.
It’s like 3 points per bottle or 10 points for a case of soda. So you can just get in the habit of drinking cans of your favorite coca cola product and use those codes if you’re not into bottles.
=P
I actually started thinking about this when my father in-law managed to acquire an entire season of House by entering codes from the Pepsi products he routinely bought for the family. It’s one of those things where, if the promotion goes on long enough, you can passively accumulate enough points to cash in for something really cool (at least in theory).
You’re right, Andrew, that the MCR prizes aren’t that appealing – hence my sarcasm when I found out one of the top “rewards” was a dorky cooler.
I dunno, they had decent stuff while they still had products worth over 2,000 points, and then cut that off.
Recently ordered this little electric grill thing (Not a George Foreman, generic brand model) that barely cooked a decent burger. Took 45 minutes to clean the thing of grease, and that’s just the plastic drip pan. New rule for it, no greasy foods.
Plus, someone go read the fine print on the “free Coke” coupons. They cover approx. 1.35 of the total cost of a 20 oz. bottle. Name one store these days selling Coke for 1.35, then stand aside as I cash in over 1,000 points for free soda. I’d imagine I could do 52 Cokes, one a week, with the amount of points I have left.
The interesting thing about that if you use two caps to get the free Coke, one of them comes from that Coke. So, while you wouldn’t replenish your supply of points, you’d still be getting a free Coke for one of the caps you already had.