I only have a couple major revolving credit cards.  I generally don’t like them, but they’re handy when traveling and for upgrading the hardware here at Casa del Garrett.  One of my cards has been pushing their "bonus points" schemes at me for years now, and I’ve never really bothered keeping track of how much of that stuff I’ve accumulated, since I figured sooner or later it would all just disappear back into the promotional void from whence it came.

Basically, every time you use that card you get some "bonus points", that supposedly you can use to buy things from their "bonus awards" catalog.  Okay…I’m old enough to be familiar with the concept here…

The Giant Food stores nearby when I was a kid gave those things out, and the Super Giant department store further down Rockville Pike had a Top Value Stamp redemption store on site.  The way it worked was, every time you bought something at Giant, or any place that gave out Top Value Stamps, you got stamps along with your change and receipt.  The more you spent, the more stamps you got.  You then took your stamps home and filled up your stamp books with them…thusly…

Those are the 1-stamp stamps.  There were also larger 10-stamp stamps, that you could stick on the beginning of a row to "fill" it. 

It was a promotional gimmick, designed to secure customer loyalty.  Another store down the street might have cheaper prices, but they didn’t give you stamps.  So if you were working on getting something from the stamp catalog, you kept buying where you got the stamps from. 

Say…you were looking to buy yourself a nice new camera or projector…

It’s kinda hard to read there…but note the prices are in "books"  That’s how it worked, basically.  Or…say you were pestering your mom for a new bike…

So 24 books would get you a neat Huffy Dragster and be the envy of all your friends.  So long as you didn’t tell them it was a Top Value Stamp bike or then you’d get mercilessly ridiculed.  And a mere 12916 books got you the Italian motor scooter. 

The big recession in the early 1970s killed off a lot of the old big suburban department stores and the stamps seemed to vanish along with them. I think people figured out they weren’t really saving any money buying things with stamps.  It was kinda fun when the economy was doing okay…but when jobs suddenly became scarce and incomes went down people watched their money a lot more carefully.  But I still have a few things here at Casa del Garrett that mom bought with those Top Value Stamps back in the day, including the clock radio I’ve had at my bedside ever since I was in third grade. The clock still works, but the radio needs new tubes.  Yes…I said tubes.

When the credit card companies started pushing their "bonus point" thing at me I just shrugged it off.  Been there…done that.  At least the stamps were finger candy.  We East African plains apes love our finger candy.  But those "bonus points" have kept right on accumulating, and just last week I got another one of their bonus award catalogs and while I was fixing dinner, decided to browse it for a bit while waiting for my soup to heat up.  My eyes lingered on a nice Panasonic cordless phone set with caller id digital answering and 3 remote handsets.

For the past couple years or so I’ve been really wanting to get rid of the absolutely terrible Motorola cordless phones I have here.  I’m usually better at judging the quality of the stuff I buy but I really got taken by Motorola that time.  I regretted buying those things I think from the first day I installed them. The volume controls do nothing…the answering machine doesn’t respond to commands while it’s playing a message or answering a call…the handsets don’t hold their charge for very long and the battery life indicators lie through their teeth…the sound quality is horrible…  I could go on… 

So for almost a couple years now, whenever I’ve walked into any electronics stores, I’ve found myself wandering over to the cordless phone shelves and pondering whether it was worth it to just buy new ones.  I’d look at this model and that, and almost start walking to the cashier with a set, only to put it back and walk away again because I was determined to get my money’s worth out of the damn Motorolas.

So I’m looking at these cordless phones from Panasonic in this bonus points catalog thing and just for kicks and grins I decided to see how much of that bonus point stuff I’d managed to gather over the years.  

Turns out…quite a bit.  Enough to get a nice flatscreen TV if I wanted.  But the TV I have works just fine thank you.  It may not be HDTV ready…but I barely watch TV any more these days anyway.  There were some nice digital video cameras, but I’m a still photography kinda guy.  And there was tons of the usual junk.  But…jeeze…if I already have enough points to get a nice new cordless phone set, then it’s not like I’m spending any new money to replace the Motorolas I despised…

So I decided to bite.  I logged onto the redemption web site and cashed in some of my points for a new cordless phone set, that would have cost me about ninety bucks had I bought them at Costco.  They were waiting for me when I got home from work this afternoon and I’m charging the batteries now.  It’s a Much nicer set then the Motorolas, and I didn’t have to spend any money to get them (I realize the cost to me was folded into my use of that card over all these years…).  Which is good because, ironically, with the economy being on the edge that it is, I’m trying not to use my credit cards much now.  I’m in a pay cash or do without mode for the time being.

It still feels…I dunno…fake somehow.  Insubstantial.  Unreal.  I mean…the new phone set is real enough.  But these damn bonus point things are just…not even there.  They’re something theoretical.  Virtual.  Am I that old I need something in my hand to believe it has some value?  Even the damn credit cards in my wallet are Something.  My bonus points were never anything more then a number on my monthly credit card statements, that I never really payed any attention to because it seemed beside the point…the point of the statements being how much I’d spent and where and how much I owed.  Points?  Points?  Right…sure…whatever.  No "points" have ever crossed my palms, but somehow they are there.  Out there.  Somewhere.  The new phones are Nice.  But somehow some part of me inside is still left wondering what exactly it was I just spent to buy them.

[Edited a tad…]