MyCokeRewards vs. PepsiStuff

I’ve been thinking about a quick and probably oversimple financial analysis of the benefits of the MyCokeRewards.com and PepsiStuff.com rewards programs. I’m typically more of a drinker of Coca-Cola products–mainly Coke Zero and Powerade (after kayaking or cycling)–and have participated in that program for much longer, but the affiliation of PepsiStuff with Amazon.com and the ability to buy music there with the points has gotten me interested in that program as well.

The simpler analysis is probably PepsiStuff. One 20 oz. bottle gets you one point. Five points gets you a song download on Amazon. A song typically goes for 89 cents. So each point is worth about 18 cents. The caveat is that not every song is buyable in this manner.

With MyCokeRewards, I often redeem 220 points for a gold movie pass good at AMC Theatres. The maximum current price of an AMC movie ticket is $9.50. The makes each point worth about 4 cents. One 20 oz. bottle of soda gets you three points, making the value of the points per bottle about 12 cents. I often buy my Coke products in 12-packs, however, and the point value on the 12-pack then works out to 40 cents.

I also saw a sign on the convenience store door that said MyCokeRewards was like, “buy eight, get one free” on 20 oz. bottles. In that case, if the store charges $1.39 for your 20 oz. bottle, the value per point is close to 6 cents and the point value per bottle works out to about 18 cents, which gets us back into the PepsiStuff value ballpark per 20 oz. bottle purchased.

I might have to do a further exercise to see if the point differential would make it beneficial to buy six-packs of 24 oz. plastic bottles rather than 12-packs of 12 oz. cans. Then you’d have to get into the eco-friendliness of plastic bottles vs. aluminum cans, too. I always recycle both, btw.