For those of you (myself included) who got hooked into the Coke promotion months ago, I am sure that most of you are aware that they have raised the premiums on the rewards substantially.

For instance, when the promotion started, one of the premiums offered was SonyStyle gift cards. A $200 gift card was valued at 1,600 points. This was incentive for people entering cap codes daily (like myself) to keep accruing points, and finally redeem them when my balance had built up. Well, as the case for all of these 'get something for nothing' promotions, by the time my balance had been built up the reward was no longer available. Disappointed, but no big loss, as there were still some decent rewards out there worth saving point balances for.

Recently they added new rewards to the site, one of them being the SonyStyle gift cards, but to my suprise they had seriously jacked up the points required. Now you need 4,000 for that same $200 gift card.

So do the math. Each code point is worth $.05**, not the twelve and a half cents it was worth 4 months ago. In short, you shouldn't be paying more than 50 cents per 12-pack code, or 15 cents for each cap. Otherwise you aren't getting your money's worth, and are better off buying the Coke products yourself.

** For some of the rewards now (the TaylorMade GC, the Shop adidas GC for example), the premium is 25 points to the dollar, so now it is $.04 to the dollar....translates to 12 cents per cap, and 40 cents per 12-pack code, and now 80 cents per case code.