How many points is a reward worth?

Originally published March 18, 2012

I was pumping gas the other day at my favorite gas station, reading the various notices on the pump because I didn't have anything better to do except stare at all the other people who were pumping gas and staring at me.

One of the notices on the pump told me that if I would have gone into the store and got one of their free cards, I could have swiped it before I swiped my credit card at the pump and earned some rewards.

Well, now, that's something.

Like Pavlov's mutts, I like a reward as much as the next person. To think all I would have to do to get one is swipe a little card, a FREE card, it just makes me feel spoiled. It's good to be an American. I bet there aren't a lot of rewards in Bolivia or the Sudan.

That's not the only free thing I got last week. I drank a Coca Cola Zero, and under the bottle cap there was a little code. I got onto the Coke Internet site, plugged in the code, and bingo!

Three points.

FREE points, in my opinion, because when I bought the soda, I was just wanting something cold to drink. The three points were a bonus.

I looked at Coke's online catalog and discovered that I could get stuff already with my three free points.

Not much, just a screen saver or a sticker or something like that. If instead I saved those three points, however, I could add to them by putting in more codes. Within a year or so, if I drank enough soda, I should be able to order a free baseball cap that would allow me to advertise Coca Cola products wherever I went.

People say the economy's in a mess, but I don't believe it, There's all these free points and rewards just sitting around for the taking!

It's impossible to be poor in this country.

I saw a TV commercial that said if I use a certain kind of credit card, I can earn rewards from them too.

It didn't feel like I would be earning them, since they were just giving them to me, but that's the way they phrased it. I didn't know if the rewards could come in the form of points, or if one could trade a reward for a certain number of points, or vice versa.

I was sure there must be an exchange somewhere where they post how much rewards and points are worth relative to each other.

A reward sounds grander than a point, however, so I decided that until I learned otherwise, I'd figure a reward must be worth at least 10 points.

If I could earn rewards and trade them for points, I could bank them with Coca Cola and get that hat faster!

That would be sweet.

Come to think of it, a few years ago, before they invented rewards and points, companies were giving away airline miles for just about everything. It seems to me that an airline mile must be worth at least a hundred bottle caps. Think about it, all the energy it takes to get an airplane up in the air, propel it for a mile, and then land. You couldn't pay a pilot to do that for a hundred bottle caps, so I'm thinking that my estimate, one mile equals 300 points or about 30 rewards, must be low.

Joyce probably has all those old receipts that are worth miles in her purse. If I could find at least a couple hundred miles, I could probably trade them for enough points to buy that Coke cap, especially if I started collecting rewards for buying gas and using a credit card. I just had to find out where you could trade these things in for each other.

I called my friend Merri at my bank, all excited.

Asked her about exchange rates, and she thought I was talking about currency or something, because she started spouting stuff about pesos and euros.

When I explained what I needed, she was quiet for a minute and then suggested that the post office might be the place to go.

They've got little flyers up over there that talk about rewards.

So I went over to the post office and, sure enough, they had some little posters on the wall. From what I could gather, if you could catch one of those fellows they had pictures of, you'd get rewards.

Well, I wasn't going to do that when I could get rewards just for pumping my gas.

But they did tell me what rewards are worth. Under this really ugly guy's picture, it said, "REWARD: $500."

Five hundred bucks?

How in the world could the gas station afford to give away $500 when I was only buying $60 worth of gas? The answer was obvious, of course: Few people must really take the time to do the research like I had.

I realized I had stumbled onto a gold mine.

With rewards being worth 10 points, every Coke bottle cap was worth $167 or so. I went and bought a six-pack, drank it, peed, and quit my job.

I went and got one of those free cards at the gas station and drove around all day as fast as I could in first gear. Filled up three times for about $200, but I had earned three rewards, worth $1,500. The gas station wouldn't let me pay for the fillups in bottle caps, unfortunately, even after I explained the whole exchange rate thing. It wouldn't cash my rewards either.

Undaunted, I called Joyce at work and told her to quit her job and start looking for airline miles in her old receipts. Every one was worth 30 rewards or $15,000, by my calculations.

She was a little skeptical at first, using hurtful phrases like "another crackpot scheme" and "Is this going to be like the iguana farm?" (For the record, the iguana farm would have worked except for the humidity.)

When we got home, we totaled up everything we had — points, rewards and miles — and converted it to dollars.

It turned out we had about $3 million. Even better, we got back on the Coke website and found out we could now afford 1,257,368 of those cool Coke ball caps!  We decided we would keep a couple thousand because I tend to go through caps pretty quickly.

The rest we plan to sell for $4 each on Craigslist. We'll use that money to buy more gasoline and Coca Cola. If my math is right, we'll be billionaires before we're 60.