My Crock of Crap Rewards
Chris Zasada July 22, 2009

Please permit me the opportunity to be a whiny American (isn’t that a right I exercise with each and every letter I type?) as I complain about free stuff. Well, not really free in the sense that money isn’t exchanged at some point to get this stuff, but it does come with a product I would buy anyway at no additional charge. I’m talking about My Coke Rewards.

We all know Pepsi was giving away Harrier jets long before Coke came up with their Coke Rewards program, (the prize-dispensing MagiCan promotion notwithstanding because that was a bit different) but Coke really got the jump on them by using cutting edge Internet technology to allow people to easily build up points without having to store easily-lost bottle caps or send anything in. Okay, this might have been cutting edge in 1997, but I think we can give Coke some slack, since they turned a temporary promotion into a fixture of the company that’s lasted three years and is supposed to see its end in December, but we’ll see about that.

For those of you with better things to do with your life, My Coke Rewards is Coca Cola’s customer loyalty program wherein customers enter codes found under bottle caps and in packaging of Coke products on the program’s website, or they can text them in, an option I’m sure cell phone companies paid big bucks to have them implement so they could charge sweet, sweet texting fees. Once you build up enough points, you can choose a fabulous prize, assuming you consumed your mortgage’s worth of Coke products to get the points.

I hopped on the Coke Rewards bandwagon after I realized I was drinking a lot of PowerAde, so I might as well get something out of it besides temporarily staving off dehydration with deliciousness. At first, I was impressed by what Coke was offering it’s customers in exchange for buying massive quantities of Coke products. Persistent customers could claim free Wiis and flat-screen TVs if they bought enough of the stuff. Granted it would cost anywhere from $ 1565 - $2085 worth of Coke to buy yourself that Wii at 6250 points depending on what kind of deal you got on the Coke (assuming you don’t find the points lying around) and you’d have to wait a long time to dispense those points due to limits on the number of codes you can enter, but to offer great stuff like this at all shows how big Coke’s bottle was.

As the promotion wore on, the prizes eventually got worse. Instead of Wiis, prize-seekers were offered second-tier Xbox 360 games, then downloadable games and trials, then, well, nothing much as far as gaming was concerned, and the other categories took a major hit as well.

The few prizes that do remain are either lame or ridiculously overpriced. As of this writing, the most expensive prize is a fifty dollar Nike gift code (they can’t even be bothered to send you the plastic) clocking in at 2000 points. Considering a three-hundred dollar console that was hard to find at the time was going just over three times that amount (3.125 times more for you math geeks), that Wii would have cost a mere 12,000 points nowadays.

Coke also slapped on a stricter limiter on the amount of codes you can enter. Instead of ten a day (which could be as much as two-hundred points), you get one-hundred and twenty a week. While this is handy if you have a crate full of caps collected from under the football stadium bleachers at your kid’s high school, you can get rid of this physical manifestation of why they won’t speak to you anymore because you actually went under the bleachers and collected used bottle caps in front of their friends in one go, it also means it would take you about one month shy of two years to collect enough points for that Wii. And you know Coke would yank that thing or end the promotion just as you were entering the last three points.

However, I can’t overlook the fact I’m complaining about free stuff. It’s not like I don’t drink a Coke product almost every day and I’m actually dumping it out in front of thirsty orphans just to get the precious points. Just comparing the exciting prizes offered for my loyalty to the sub-credit card gift prizes they offer now qualifies as a slight downer in this country, and I thought to comment on it.

Coke proposes to end the program at the end of the year, and prizes have to be redeemed by the end of November. If they do go through with this, I’d wager to guess there won’t be as much of a mad rush to claim points before they’re as valuable as currency with Saddam Hussein’s picture on it as you’d think. I imagine many people will half-heartily pick out something they maybe could use to fill up their garage sale inventory or give away as a gift to someone they don’t usually give gifts to (or like) in the spirit of not wanting to waste virtual money. Another, likely higher-than-expected portion will forget about spending the points and/or just not care.

So thanks for the memories, Coke. I look forward to spending the points I’ve saved for the last two years or so that would have previously netted me something cool on a one-day car rental, a magazine subscription to Oprah magazine, and maybe a buy-one-get-one Blockbuster coupon like the kind a I find in the newspaper. I also look forward to the day I can finally curse myself of this disease that forces me to save bits of packaging in a pathetic effort to get more useless junk to fill up my house.