I Hate My Coke Rewards So Much

The coupons you print on the site (which I originally thought was a "hooray, it's green!" move) are not accepted by my local grocers.

So now, it's all just a cluster-fuck unless you want to use your points to buy Coke advertising premiums.

Since some of you are Coke collectors, I suppose that's fine. Me? I just want free (or, grudgingly will accept, discounted) pop.

There are two results of this:

1) I continue to ween myself off of Coke products. (Totally what you wanted with your loyalty program, right Coke?)

and 2) I will be ridding myself worth of months of Coke points. (Details to be announced at Things Your Grandmother Knew; stay tunned there.)

My Coke Punishments

As you know, I grudgingly use My Coke Rewards.

Coke has made some changes to the program. The good news is that they finally let you print your coupons rather than wait for (and have the added cost & wastes of) mail. The bad news is that they have ended the one free 12-pack for 100 points.

Now you need 200 points to buy one 12-pack, get one 12-pack free. That sucks. Or, it's 35 points for $1 off. Which also sucks.

Bring back the free stuff, you bastards. I pay plenty for my Dt. Coke as it is -- & am punished with your slow flash site for participating in your points program. You make more than enough profit; just let me get a free 12-pack every 10 purchases.

Or I'll switch to another product. Maybe even tap water. You make nothing off that.

My Coke Rewards: A Lot Of Cardboard Lying About The House

I drink a lot of Diet Coke, and the price of cola sure has increased in the past few years -- even the generic (yuck) cola is expensive. So I gave in and decided to use My Coke Rewards.

Here's my 6 Lines Or Less (Yeah Right) Review:

You enter the codes printed inside the cardboard boxes, which means you have a lot of cardboard lying about the house until you do so, and the site only allows you to enter up to 10 codes per day, which means you have a lot of cardboard lying about the house (until, one imagines, you catch up).

The site is in a I'm-so-cool-I-use-flashy-scripts that I cannot access or use it with my own PC (I am on Linux, with Firefox), so I have to use hubby's; which means I have a lot of cardboard laying about the house while I wait for chances to use his PC.

The great news is that I'm not stuck turning my points into "Coke Collectibles" but rather can redeem them for an "award" of Coke products (100 points for a 12-pack of pop).

But the bad news is that you cannot select multiples of each reward, so with 500 points to redeem for 5 packs of pop I have to go through the same motions 5 times, including finding the item (4-5 clicks depending upon the number of rewards in that category), and the annoying address/post information requiring the manual entry of my phone number each time as the widget doesn't save it -- all of which is is annoying and makes me put off entering the codes and so I have a lot of cardboard lying about the house.

The odd thing, especially for the ultra-slick-flashy-script-site is that Coke sends you the coupon for the free 12-pack via the mail not email, which means you not only have a several week wait for a reward which could easily be emailed & printed, but Coke has the added expense of paying for paper, envelopes and postage (now I know why the prices have increased so much, thank you), which is also not very green.

Perhaps this isn't all that bad and shouldn't warrant the 'bad companies' label... While it's not too annoying to use, it sure could be better.