Despite the ubiquity of supposedly free offers online, it’s no secret that most are at best email address harvesters and at worst identity-theft scams. Over time I have tried many of these programs, and a few have filtered out of the pack that have actually paid off for me, so I figured I might as well document these for posterity, since genuine reviews and recommendations of such services online are so few and far between as to be basically nonexistent.
Anyway, like many manufacturers whose business depends heavily on brand loyalty (like, say, cigarette manufactures) the Coca-Cola company places codes on many of their products which can be redeemed for points at mycokerewards.com. Most people tend not to participate in such programs since entering the codes is remarkably tedious and to get anything decent usually requires purchasing said product in Costco-sized bulk quantities, any until recently I was among them as regards the mycokerewards program. However, despite regular admonishments from my dentists, I regularly drink quite a bit of Diet Coke in cans, and I got in the habit of saving the cardboard can boxes because I found they make great shipping protection for the books, CDs, comics and such that I sell periodically on ebay (though far less often since their last nonsensical set of feedback rule changes). As a result, my hall closet began to fill with the empty boxes. Eventually, I began staring at the pile and wondering just how many mycokerewards points the stack constituted — hundreds? Thousands? Having never before bothered with the program, I had no frame of reference, but I figured it might be worth my time to find out.
Turns out they limit the number of codes one can enter in a day to ten, so it took awhile to whittle down the pile. Still, this was far better than painstakingly doing it one at a time, and soon I found I had built up a grand total of 1400 points from my now-empty closet despite the fact that the mycokerewards site is absolutely awful, filled with pointless flash interstitials, illogical categorization of rewards, no basic ’show all rewards’ option, and unnecessary animation.
Like all such programs, mycokerewards offers a variety of rewards, but some are just ridiculously out of range. Probably the most practical and useful reward offered by mycokerewards is actually a full 20-piece set of Rachael Ray-endorsed cookware, but to get said reward one would need to redeem 14400 points, or the equivalent of 1440 12-can packs of Coca-Cola products — 17280 cans. So yeah, while I thought my year-plus pile of empty Coke cases was substantial, it wasn’t anywhere near Rachael Ray territory.
After browsing through the entire catalog of rewards, and realizing that the earbuds that came with my ipod were in fact impossibly shitty-sounding as well as ill-fitting, I settled on a pair of black Skullcandy “Smokin’ Earbuds” which “cost” me a mere 731 points. And lo and behold, yesterday sitting at my door when I got home (thanks, DHL) was a package containing these:
Unfortunately, a quick perusal of the mycokerewards catalog shows that it looks like they’ve removed these earbuds from the possible rewards, so I may have gotten in just under the line on that one. Still, depending on how many Coca-Cola products you drink on a weekly basis it may just end up being worth your while to tear off and save up the codes in a drawer somewhere and enter the codes in whenever you feel you’ve built up enough for it to be worthwhile and you have nothing better to do. I myself have 749 points remaining in my account there and none of the rewards within that range really catch my eye at the moment. Though if necessary I could burn off those points on movie tickets or promotional t-shirts, for now I’m content to let them sit until, perhaps in a year or so, I have built up enough to bother foraging through the mycokerewards site to pick out something else.
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