It seems today that all you see are companies with various rewards programs, whether they are free, whether you have to pay for them, and whether they are bad, good, or amazingly good. The point of this is to talk about rewards programs that you either use or know of, and maybe to even get some users interested in other programs if they like what they see. I am probably a member of more than a dozen different rewards programs, but the ones that I’m actually active in is quite small. The ones that I am the most active in are Power Up rewards, My Coke Rewards, Belly Rewards, AMC Stubs, and Bing rewards, all of which are quite fantastic in their own ways.




My favorite one of them all has to be Belly Rewards. They are used in dozens of different stores and restaurants, but the only place that I use it in is 7-11. Every time I visit, I scan the card, and no matter how little I pay, I get 5 points. Rewards are pretty cheap too, after 7 visits, I get a free large coffee on the 8th, or a bunch of other free food items depending on how many points I have.

Bing rewards is just as amazing because you get points for every time you search on Bing, and depending on your rank, you can get like 40 points a day in total, all sorts of discounts, and you can use your points for a ton of fun rewards. They stopped offering this reward, but based on how often I search, I was able to get a free movie ticket every month just for doing my normal searches, and they have all sorts of other prizes as well.

AMC Stubs is great if you go to the movies often, it’s $12 for a yearly membership and for every $100 you spend on tickets and concessions, you get a free $10 gift card. That alone would be worth the price if you go to the movies as often as me, but if you are a member, you get free popcorn and drink upgrades to the next size, and all online ticket fees are waived.

My Coke Rewards is pretty basic, you use the codes on caps and you get points. Back in the day, I used to get 1 or 2 bottles of whatever, whether it was soda, juice, or just water, so basically at the end of the week I would have enough points to get 2 free bottles, or I could save them for some pretty sweet stuff.

Power Up Rewards is kinda lame, but it’s worth it if you buy a lot of games so you can quickly rack up points, or for some of the coupons and the Game Informer subscription if you are a Pro member, which is worth it.




Those are some of the best rewards programs that I know of. Do you use any of these or are no thinking of trying them out? Have you had any bad experiences with these or know of some other good ones? Share your stories!

As far as I know, no, I do not. I use my step-dad's Power Up card at Game Stop so I think he uses rewards programs. Oh wait, My Nintendo is a rewards program, I completely forgot. That's the only one I use pretty much for now.

Lexatom : I don't know why, but I'm not too much of a fan of the whole My Nintendo thing. I used to use Club Nintendo a lot, and I know it's pretty much the same thing, but once that shut down and then My Nintendo took over, I just stopped caring about Nintendo programs ever since then.

I really miss Club Nintendo though, I had SOOO MANY points there. I would be able to buy a game and one or two different items every month because I had more than enough points for that, but I just lost interest, and when the program ended, I still had TONS of points leftover.

zanderlex :

Yeah, I prefer Club Nintendo over this garbage known as My Nintendo. I only joined My Nintendo because free rewards, you know? I like free rewards. xD

The only reward program I use all the time is my Food Lion MVP card. You can save some serious money on your shopping with it.

Oldschool777 : I always loved the idea of getting one of those cards for grocery/supermarket stuff. I was recently at shop rite and they had some if the most amazing deals that you can think of, like there was one sale where you can get 5 2 liter bottles of sad for only $3 but the only catch was that you need a membership. The deals are great and can drastically reduce the price of what you pay for many things, but I'm personally not a fan of memberships where you only get stuff for cheaper, I like the kinds of programs where you actually get free stuff or you get more for what you pay, instead of getting what you expected to get, but for less.

You should get them,they are great. Doritos can be a bit pricey,but at times I can get 2 bags for 6 dollars. Or the buy one,get one free deals. I think the PS plus or Xbox Live cards would be more up your alley,at times they have discounted games or free games.

Oldschool777 : Funny story, I just LOVE Doritos, but I would never consider getting one of those big bags, as a matter if fact, I would never get any type of chips in one of those big bags. As for Doritos, I only buy the ones that are either $1 or the ones for 2 for $1. I just don't like the idea of eating some chips and then putting the rest away lol.

Well, if I could get some discounts on games or cards, then that might change my mind depending on what you have to do to get the membership.

Weird. I like the big bags in case I want some later. I think with the PS plus it is 18 dollars for 3 months and Xbox is around 20,I think.

Oldschool777 : Lol, I'm pretty sure that's how much they normally cost regardless of where you get them. For PSN, 3 months for $18 and I think a year is either $60 or $50, which is the standard price. Around the time of Black Friday, I was able to get a really cool deal at Walmart, they were selling the PSN cards for $10 for 3 months, so I was able to get the whole year for $40 and I actually went back the next day and bought the same thing, so two years for $80 which was a HUG discount.

But you can get the content on the PS Plus and Xbox online that would normally cost you much more without the premium cards. Not to mention at time games can be free to PS Plus or Xbox Gold users.

My Mother bought a pro membership for Gamestop Rewards and I use it, also I've been using Bing so that I may on an off chance win a contest.
I actually like Rewards programs because they're a nice way to encourage people to actually use your product or service.
Nintendo isn't very good at it though, they basically replaced their rewards program with a horrible dumbed down version of Club Nintendo. 

pennylessz : I had a hilarious encounter when I was using Bing a while back and trying to do one of their instant win things. I had a ton of points at the time and I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to do one of their games, maybe I can win at least some credits back.

So I did the one where you have to scratch off the 3 little boxes and for the first couple of times I lost each time. Then I play for like theb1th time and the first 2 show a picture of the. Microsoft band, and I was like oooh, and then the 3rd showed it as well and I was like OMG. I thought I won but it only turned out to be that I won an entry in the sweepstakes for that item and I never trusted their instant win games ever again.

I constantly use them, even more so with my husband who is part of 50,000 such programs. Considering how much government tries to take away your money, getting these free rewards is a little relief that is always welcomed.
When not using airline cards I usually prefer the ones giving back cash back like Costco. I know, it's marginal (1 to 4 percent), but every bit counts.

Having literally no recreational money whatsoever, I try to rack up some points for MyCokeRewards and Bing Rewards to put towards Amazon cards. Though, I've been pretty lazy with my Bing account lately... I tried Swagbucks, but it takes FOREVER to get any points at all without like... a billion referrals because you're almost always disqualified for the surveys. That actually reminds me.... I need to enter my coke codes for this week.

janus : 50,000?!?! I don't even believe that that's possible, that's A LOT. Does he specifically look for every single program that he can join? Does he just randomly join one when he sees one? I don't see how anybody can join that many, I probably don't even have 30 and yet I'm not even active in half of those and those 30 probably send me about 200 emails a month or more. He's got to get close to a million emails a month just from the programs?



m0ssb3rg935 : Oh boy, I know how you love your My Coke Rewards. :p

zanderlex : I used to hate it with a passion because of how long and repetitive it was trying to read and type in each 3 point code, 75 points a week. Ever since I started buying them on Vizzed though, I just gotta copy and paste them. It's SO much better.

BTW, got any spare codes to sell?

m0ssb3rg935 : I would have had a few codes to spare lol, if I hadn't been drinking 2 bottles of Pepsi products every day for the last 2 weeks lol. If that was all Coke products, i could have had more than 80 points just from the last 2 weeks alone.

I hate typing up codes too, which is why when I was big on MCR, what I would do is just save the codes, then like once a month type up all the codes for that month in one go (Which would take me about 15 to 20 minutes) but it was much better than having to scramble to find everything, log in, and type almost every day at least.

zanderlex : I was exaggerating, silly . He nevertheless has points with many airlines and hotels, which makes our traveling very inexpensive. He usually takes cards with interesting rewards (he has an email account almost exclusively for ads) that will be profitable. For example we hardly get anything from American Airlines since the cities we live in are a) ill-served by the company or 2) rewards are impossible to use. Unlike Star Alliance (United, Air Canada) that have so many members.

I have quite a bit of Power-Up points saved on my Gamestop card, though I have yet to ever redeem them for anything. Some of the things they advertise in Game Informer that you can get with the points are pretty freakin' awesome. I might jump on that when I have some free time (basically once the TdV is over ).

Other than that, have a few that are like for Walgreen's and stuff for their sales, but never actually redeem the points for anything. Most of the time I only get these kinds of things if they offer a discount on what I purchase more so than the actual rewards aspect of it.

Maybe I should capitalizing more on these points? Free stuff is always nice