When I was in school, mysterious state-endorsed hucksters would burst through my classroom door from time to time with arms full of candy bars. These guys would then proceed to gang press us all as unpaid door-to-door candy salesmen. The candy bars (which were usually more peanut and Chinese newspaper than chocolate) were uniformly terrible; moreover, they cost like 5 bucks each. But these guys were smart: they kept us hustling with the promise of prizes for reaching impossible goals. Ten candy bars sold got you a pencil, but a million? A robot dinosaur that transformed into a monster truck. Needless to say, the best prizes were logistically unattainable.

Looks like Coca Cola has learned some similar things about keeping people hustling for unattainable prizes. Matt V. from Mattazuma’s Revenge wrote us to point out that most of the high-level prizes from mycokerewards.com are impossible to win. For example, an American Idol couch costs 56,000 points… 26,000 points more than the maximum amount of Coke points it is possible to accrue over the life of the contest.

And how many cans of Coke would you have to drink to win that couch? Six thousand, seven hundred and twenty. Drinking that many Cokes, it’s probably better to sit on a cement floor, as any piece of furniture is just going to explode into wooden splinters beneath your jiggly corpulence.

my coke rewards – impossible prizes [Mattazuma’s Revenge]

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