Stephen Yeargin

There are always those moments in life when you sit and wonder a bit about the cyclical nature of life. No matter how hard we try to be our “own person”, it seems fate has a way of showing us flashes of the past within our present.

Last summer, the moment struck me as I was driving a mini-van down a West Tennessee road, listening to 70s and 80s “classic” rock on my way to an early morning work assignment.

This summer’s flashback scene is brought to you by the Coca-Cola Company

Through about the third grade, I can remember my parents collecting Kool-Aid points off of the packages to send them in for free stuff. To the best of my knowledge, the most we ever received for it were plastic glassware and a pitcher in the brand icon’s likeness.

You have to figure, however, that as much as two-plus children can down of the sugar-ladened drink, one might as well recoup some of the expense. To do so required Zip-Loc bags full of empty packets stacked on high in the pantry. More of them were tossed than were ever redeemed, and the cool stuff required an obscene amount of packets.

So, here, this September evening almost two decades later, I am counting Coke caps. The motivation is the same: I personally believe that this household singlehandedly keeps at least one department in a division of the company afloat. It is a mystery as to why we do not own stock, and if I could turn in the caps for shares, I probably would.

The MyCokeRewards program is not a glamorous endeavor. Like the CD Boom-box from Kool-Aid, I will never have 12,187 points for a consumer-level Mini-DV camcorder. To do so would require about 4,062 20 oz. bottle caps (3 points each), ringing in at about $4,427.92. You can buy the exact same device for about $300 at your local Best Buy.

Still, as Tennessee does not have a deposit law that would give us money back for returning the bottles themselves, the program is the only way to recoup any of one’s expense. For the vast majority of consumers (who have only a single 20 oz. product a day or less), it is simply not worth the effort to keep the caps around (there are 32 spread out on my desk) or spend the time to key in the 12 or 14-digit code into a marketing Web site. It takes me 20 minutes to enter my maximum of 10 codes a day. I will leave you to decipher how I have accumulated 512 points so far.

I work in marketing and I certainly see the ingenious idea of having me flip through Coke-related and non-Coke advertising to see how I could redeem these things. For the partners, they have already accomplished the goal of making me “want” their product for no intrinsic reason other than the need to offload this worthless pseudo currency.

In Canon’s case, the impossible point total for the Mini-DV camcorder might make one think that it is a luxury item. Imagine how excited that consumer would be to see a Red Tag special for it at their local department store. Before visiting the site, they would not have even considered buying the overpriced toy.

There is also the impending feeling that the program could be canned (pardon the pun) at any time. I suppose if those are the only risks I face in life, I am doing just fine.

“OOOOOOOH YA!”