Bottle Cap

I want to focus on one of the things in the title photograph of this blog today. This is the bottle cap. This red bottle cap is from the Coca-Cola company. My mother collects them for their serial numbers found underneath them which are coke reward points. Whenever I see an empty coke bottle lying around I grab the cap so I can give to my mother. After the serial number is entered it just goes to the garbage, so essentially I'm just holding on to trash for my mom right now.

This brings a few things to mind. First is working at the West Concord Supermarket. When I was 15 or so my first job was to be stock boy for this small nice family supermarket. Other than being paid the other perk would be that I would be able to take a drink or two a day. I started off just taking whatever I wanted and trying new things etc. But the clever lads at Sprite came up with an idea. Back then Sprite had its own reward system (Rocketcash or something). This was a pretty cool way to do a reward system because you were rewarded in cash. Most of them were a dime but some were a quarter, half dollar or dollar. You would be able to spend them at designated online vendors. After taking about two Sprites a day about two days a week I ended up buying a Boyhitscar album. And with the left over cash i got some replacement lenses for oakley sunglasses (which my dad turned into sunglasses using the peices of safety glasses he got from work. It worked from an advertising perspective because when I would buy a CD from the interenet I usually got it from the website that Sprite introduced me to (cduniverse) before switching to other means after a few years.

Sometime before that my parents would drink pepsi in order to cut the points off the side for 'Pepsi Stuff'. I forget what we got but we did that for a while. I remember the commercial had a harrier jet on it and one dude tried to buy it and sued when he couldn't get it. You would be able to submit a minimum amount of points for any item and then pay about ten cents for every point or so that you still needed if you wanted to get something out of your point range. Well, the price for the harrier jet advertised on the commercial was quite a bargain apparently.

Sometime in high school I collected "Planet Lunch Ploids"which was the Lays chip point system. I got some cheap Yak-Bak door alarm or something. I would occasionally go as far as diggin in the trash in my high school to find bags to cut out the points on the back.

My mom smokes Marlboro Lights religeously. Probably about a pack a day for as long as I can remember. On the sides they have Marlboro Miles. I've always suggested to her to start collecting that. We'd probably have a Marlboro brand pickup truck by now if she did. (A brief search of the internet has shown me that the whole mile program is over so people will stop being addicted to nicotine or someting. Interesting that the phillip morris page and wikipedia deny its existence.)