This year, Coke’s got a promotion going on called MyCokeRewards.  After we stocked up on a ton of coke products, after a sale and before some friends were coming over, I figured I’d start collecting the points and see what I could save up for.  At first, it’s depressing how many points you need to gather (you’d need to submit 125 codes from 12packs to get a free Wii game, and more than three times that many 2 liters).  Of course, if you think creatively, it ends up not being so hard for a couple of reasons.  First, you can gather points from all over the places.  I snagged two 20pt codes from my neighbors recycling bin yesterday.  I’ve got a feeling if I really wanted I could gather half the points needed for Zelda just by going through my neighborhood’s recycling bins before they’re collected.  It’s not quite free to do that though — it does cost some pride.  Still, I’ve never valued pride particularly highly and I wouldn’t be above driving around and at least looking for obvious coke products to code grab, though digging through each neighbors bin might be a little… awkward.

My next plan of attack is to ask friends and family to save their codes for me if they don’t need them.  This is pretty easy to do and by leveraging the purchasing power of multiple friends, a good way to speed up your code gathering.  It gets a bit depressing though when you do the math of how much work it takes.  For example, given points for each product ranging from 25 to 3, but the most common being 3 and 10, if you manage to average 10pts per code, and you factor in that you’re limited to entering 10 codes per day, this means that if you actually wanted to get a Wii (over 6000 points), you’d have to enter the maximum number of codes every day, each day, for more than two months straight.  It’s a bit depressing, but since I’m only shooting for the 1250 point Paper Mario, and I’ve got about 250 points right now, I’m already 20% through.  Since I just started asking others for their codes, hopefully only a month or two later I’ll have saved up.

I really don’t have nearly the spare time it sounds like I have, I swear!  Every spare moment I’ve been working on a set of articles which will hopefully be done soon.  Magazine may have moved online only, but I’m still plenty busy!

Posted by Jordan on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 7:48 am.