Extremely Lame

What ever happened to the good old days when contests consumer contests simply either said “Sorry, try again” or “You won!”? The most complex game when I was growing up was the Monopoly game at McDonald’s. Everything else was pretty much a win or lose situation.

Nowadays, not only do you have to buy something in order to get a chance to win, you also have to give up some of your time to them as well. Many chain restaurants print on the receipt a chance to win some money if only you participate in their survey and open yourself up to being spammed by them. It’s not exactly unsolicited, so it’s not really spam. But you certainly don’t want it. It’s not spam, but it’s awfully close. I call it bacon.

While those aren’t so bad, since they never gave away anything on the receipts anyway, the caps of soda are a different story. Those you often had free things given away on those. It’s a rarity for that nowadays. Most of the time, if there’s anything printed on the underside of a cap, it’s an eight character code. The way to translate that code is to go to that particular soda’s website, endure an eyebomb of advertising, and enter the code to see how many points that code is worth. Yeah, instead of flat out telling you that you’re a loser, they make most of these codes worth a scant amount of points. It’s like getting a single ticket in skeeball when you need several thousand tickets to get anything cool.