I’m down in the basement, picking through empty cartons of not-from-concentrate Tropicana orange juice. They are on standby for a trip to the bottle depot. Quite a few of them are on standby. Any day now, they’ll make their journey.
Since they are 1.89-litre containers (why they are not 2-litres is something I’ll try to figure out another day), they are worth big money. Gable-top juice vessels that are over a litre are worth 20 cents each at the bottle depot.
And there’s more. Each container also has an alphanumeric code -- 12 numbers or letters -- that’s used for tracking the carton. The code is also good for 5 Aeroplan points. So I’m catching up with my logging of points. I’ve signed on to http://www.choosemore.ca with my laptop and I’m typing in the codes.
After nearly three years of collecting, I’m getting close to 2,000 points. I know -- that’s a lot of orange juice. And I could have gone with the frozen concentrate, which is cheaper (but not as tasty). And, yes, I could have bought oranges and squeezed them myself. I could have also read all the bad press about how not-from-concentrate orange juice is made, and been put off.
But here I am, still drinking Tropicana, still collecting the points. (I’ve stuck with them despite the carton design debacle.)
As I’m typing in the codes, I wonder how many other people go to this much effort. Quite a few I guess, since the Tropicana people have gone to all the effort of creating a website, and limiting code submissions to 10 a day. Must be quite a few of us coders out there.
At the rate I’m going, it’ll be a few more years before orange juice alone gets me onto a plane. (I cashed in Air Miles points for the first time a few weeks ago for a trip to Alberta; it took about 15 years to get enough points. I wasn’t all that aggressive about collecting.)
Another aside: We used to collect our Tropicana cartons in a clear plastic bag outside the carport door. One day in the spring, when the bag was nearly full, the cartons disappeared. So did the bag. I’m guessing 20 cartons were in there. (20 X 20 cents = $4). Being a little dull, I collected more cartons in the same spot. And they disappeared. So, I’m more security conscious now about our cartons. Message to the person who took the cartons: I guess you really needed them; you’re welcome. But, please don’t come onto my property again. I am no longer storing cartons outside the carport door.
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My points obsession is getting a boost thanks to Thrifty Foods and their new loyalty card. You get one point for each dollar spent. The best thing to do with all those points, I’ve decided, is to convert them into Aeroplan points — 2 Thrifty points for 1 Aeroplan point.
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Eric Akis has written a profile of Jo Zambri, co-owner of Italian restaurant Zambri's.
Zambri's is expanding and will move to a bigger location next year at the Atrium building, 800 Yates, Eric reports. The existing location is 911 Yates.
