Bottle Caps: Good for Things Besides Drinking Games by Brookidy

I’m a Diet Coke addict. Seriously. When people at meetings ask how I take my coffee, I tell them, “in a Diet Coke can”. I drink 6-7 full glasses a day, and there’s one on the nightstand when I go to bed. I prefer it chilled, then poured over ice in an insulated cup so that the melting ice doesn’t dilute the pure, delicious flavor. I’m a junkie, it’s my crack, and I don’t care that it’s probably not that good for me.

Since my hubs suffers from the same addiction, I usually purchase ten to twelve 2-liter bottles per week. (I know it’s expensive – more on that later.) One day, while accidentally paying attention to what I was doing, I noticed a tiny code inscribed on the inside of the bottle cap.

Being a hardcore conspiracy theorist, I immediately assumed that the bottle was outfitted with some sort of tracking device, and promptly set it on fire. After my husband finished scraping the molten plastic from the bathtub, he calmly informed me that the code was part of the My Coke Rewards promotion, which he had been participating in behind my back for months.

Since he is quite possibly the cheapest man on the planet, the hubs had become obsessed with entering the codes at mycokerewards.com in the hope of accumulating enough points to get something for free. I assumed that the choices would be as follows: Coke T-shirts, Coke glasses, Coke cooler… anything branded with the Coke logo that I could carry around, making me an unwitting marketing tool for the man.

Wrong. The website does have lots of Coke branded merchandise, but it also has a lot of really useful, even cool stuff. Around Christmas of last year, we had accumulated over 3000 Coke points. I used a very small amount of them (150, I think) to order customized photo coffee mugs from Snapfish.com. My parents and in-laws loved them. And they were free.

Feeling flush from success, I continued entering codes weekly, saving up for something bigger, better, and most importantly, for myself. The payoff came earlier this week. I entered a few codes, then decided to browse the available awards. Jackpot: 2000 points got me a $50 Nike gift card. I had been pondering the purchase of a new pair of kicks anyway, so the prospect of a $50 savings sealed the deal. I purchased the card, and was immediately given a discount code good for use at Nikestore.com. No snail mail, no shipping fee, no 4-6 week processing time. Instant gratification, it’s what our generation demands. I got my new shoes, saved $50, and even got free shipping from Nike. No gas for a trip to the mall, no pushy sock upsell from the bishes at Lady Foot Locker, no $6 impulse trip to Cinnabon’s.

You may be wondering, “why should I spend $400 to get $50”. Listen, I buy a lot of shit that gives me JACK in return, so anything is a good thing. If you’re going to be buying the product anyway, you may as well let the company give you something for your loyalty. Sure, it takes a while to accumulate enough points for anything super, but it’s worth it. And, you’ll probably find that a lot of your friends, neighbors, and co-workers don’t save their caps, so you can take theirs and accumulate rewards at no cost to you.

As happy as I am with my freebies, I recently had to end my relationship with Diet Coke. I’m now buying the Publix brand “Diet Cola”, or the Sam’s Choice at Wal-Mart. It took some time to get used to, but now I really like the taste. Why? Diet Coke is going for about $1.75, and last week the Publix brand was 2 for $1.00. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Until I can afford to go back to my longtime lovah, I will continue to scrounge trash cans at the ball park, looking for forgotten caps, saving up to buy a subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine (257 points).