RIP, My Coke Rewards

So this is the last day of My Coke Rewards, the frequent-drinker's program where you would get codes off of Coke plastic bottle caps and can-pack packaging and enter them into the company's website (or through an app, even though I never downloaded it).  Doing that allows you can eventually redeem them for stuff like ... uh, gift certificates.

I have absolutely no idea when I started this or how I got roped into this.  I know it's been a long time.  In fact, I remember when I was back in El Paso, after some event at a high school stadium let out, I saw all these Coke and Sprite bottles (apparently this high school contracted through Coke) littered on the bleachers.  I had all the time in the world, and I wasn't going to live there long-term, so I decided to not care how I looked and spent a good, oh, half-hour going up and down the bleachers, twisting off the caps of every bottle that had a My Coke Rewards code on the other side.  While I was doing this one woman shouted out to me something to the affect of, "Are you OK?  Oh, you're just finding caps."

I decided to spread out entering the codes because if I didn't enter a code over a period of, I think, 90 days, the account gets deactivated and, at a period of time after that, you would lose all your points.  So I think I shoved all these codes I gathered at the stadium and basically hoarded them for years.  When I visited my sister when she lived in Los Angeles she volunteered to enter some for me.  The rest I finally put in, several at a time, over the winter at work at the health insurance place.  Some of those codes I held onto for years.  I'll be honest, now thinking about it -- the codes I got from El Paso, they may all have been entered by my sister.  Maybe I didn't keep them with me until this past winter.  But I'll say that I kept them for a long, long time.

My plan of meting those codes out every three months so my account wouldn't go dormant didn't work.  I entered codes so sparingly I forgot to enter them at all.  I lost my account twice; the second time, over the past year (did I blog about this?), I had to beg and grovel to get my points back.  That was shortly before Coke announced that they're ending My Coke Rewards.  What timing.

There were two major deadlines.  A few months ago was the deadline after which you could no longer enter codes.  So all these bottles being sold with 10-(?) character strings of nonsense are now useless.  And now, today, is the last day to redeem those codes.  So after last week, when I cashed in about half my remaining points for an Amazon gift card (which I immediately used to knock ten bucks off the new cable modem I purchased), I've been in kind of a frenzy.

Well, make that last night.  After lamenting that I was four points short of another $10 Amazon gift card (dammit) I got a $10 Target gift card, bought this offer for prints on Shutterfly (a site that apparently is just giving shit away for free), made a donation for, get this, a nickel to my high school, and with nothing else I can spend it on, I redeemed the rest for chances on sweepstakes for debit cards.  Thank goodness for single-point redemptions; otherwise I would have surrendered them (after they were converted) to a charity of Coke's choosing, only the categories of their philanthropic aims were known.  (We get to vote on giving unused points to a charity that provides "Education," "Empowerment" or, uh, the "Environment?")

Best to do it now and be done with it.  I guess I had a relationship with it because I've done this for so long.  It was kind of a millstone, but sometimes, when I'm walking and I see a cap on the ground, I look around to see if strangers are looking at me.  And if there aren't (or if the strangers are people who seem cool), I would pick it up and/or twist it off the bottle and put it in my pocket to enter later.  That was a part of my life, irregular as it was, for at least 16 years.

And after tonight, it's officially gone.  I don't know if I am happy.  I don't know if I am sad.  I feel that torn about a lot of things.

ETA at 12:08 a.m. on Friday, June 30 a correction, a pretty big one: I got the end date wrong.  My Coke Rewards ends on June 30, which is Friday.  Late Friday night is when it shuts down.  Apologies.