MyPoints

Full disclosure. I wanted this to be a post sponsored by MyPoints. It didn’t happen. On to the post.

I signed up for MyPoints, a website where you earn points for shopping online (and by clicking on emails), in December 1999. I probably figured that my computer was going to die thanks to Y2K,*so I might as well get some points towards purchasing a new computer. The fact that a website has been around for more than 20 years is rather remarkable. How many other shopping websites (not sites like ESPN.com or CNN.com) do you know that are still around from the 20th century? And how many sites have you used consistently for 20 years? Anyway, I don’t do much online shopping, but when I do, I go through MyPoints to earn points. I’ve earned enough points over the years to get probably $1000+ in gift cards to places like Target and Wegmans. Sure, they send me too many emails a day, but I just don’t open many of them. In related news, my one email account has 9,000 unread messages. Not 9,000 emails. 9,000 unread emails. That’s my email account linked to MyPoints and others sites like airlines, hotels, and restaurants. I should probably unsubscribe to things someday.

Anyway, as I mentioned at the start of the post, I contacted MyPoints in the hopes they would sponsor this post. I figured they might like the free exposure in exchange for maybe 7,000 points. They did not reply to my message. With that written, if you’re not part of MyPoints and want to be, please let me know. I’m happy to get points through a referral.

(And maybe MyPoints will see this and decide to give me points.)


* Quick Y2K story. I called the company where I bought my computer in late 1999 to see if it was going to die. They said I would be fine as long as I had Windows95. When I replied that I had Windows 3.1 (less than 2% of computers with Windows had this or an earlier version), the representative said oh and got quiet. The computer survived.