A while back I had read some other cheapskate blogs and they were talking about how they were getting all these great free things just by entering in the cap codes into mycokerewards.com. I’ve been saving my rewards for about a year now, and although I don’t drink absorbent amounts of coke products (and I’m not 100% brand loyal, becuase sometimes it’s a little hard to lay down $5 for a 12 pack, after all that turns into .42 cents a can at the grocery store)
Now previously there was a lady at the previous place that I used to work that used to collect them from all the employees for her grandkids. I could see how this could work, because if you get a bag of them at one time, or on a regular basis then could could actually accumulate a decent amount of points. I had to hand them 25-40 points every other month. A handful of other people did the same thing so add that to their own personal points they could actually get something decent in a relatively short amount of time.
The other problem I’m having is just the flash heavy content of mycokerewards.com (actually it might be FLEX because of all the back end database calls) but there’s a lot of times that it will hang and spin looking up your codes and login information.
Someone on the User Interface Engineering blog described the experience like this:
This is just barely scratching the surface. If you end up actually using the flash app (I do – I drink a lot of soda) to get rewards it’s a usability hell.
The whole UI is dog slow. You will spend most of your time watching windows flip around, fade in fade out. It’s the most overanimated site I’ve ever seen.
You will be bombarded with a worthless survey every time you login.
Be careful what you click on, you made get the sound of a screaming crowd in some commercial.
You are only allowed to enter 10 codes per day. You are only told this AFTER you enter the 10th code *correctly*. There is no counter, no warning on the 9th code. Woe is the person who accumulated a huge mass of caps and codes and expects to enter them infrequently.
Someone also did make an iPhone app as well (found here ), but then again what hasn’t been made into an iPhone app yet?
On a positive side though they do offer free movie tickets with large drink, and at fifteen bucks a pop for a prime time weekend showing and add another 4 or 5 dollars for the drink, that’s alright. Some of the most obtainable rewards are Magazine Subscriptions. Maybe I’m just another insensitive man, but I’m not interested in a subscription to O magazine by Oprah. (I have a feeling more that I’m not the target demographic that coke was looking for with that one. Reading through some of the blogs that do though the Coke Rewards program did have some users that had problems redeeming the subscription to GoodHousekeeping, but other free subscriptions seemed to work fine.
| Magazine | Smart Money | WIRED | Esquire | The O mag |
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| Points Needed | 158 pts | 142 pts | 115 pts | 275 pts |
Here’s the real question that I’m pondering here: For how bad of free stuff am I ready to give away my marking information and jump on another electronic or snail mail junk list?
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