Amazon Coins

I hope this dies quickly, or at least isn't as horrifying as Facebook credits.

See, I worked at a Facebook game company when the Facebook credit thing came online and it was universally a bad deal for game devs. It was Yet Another Payment Chain to implement, a weird checkout flow (we had an off-site version of the same game which could use PayPal, but not FB credits, whereas on the Facebook version of the game, you could use FB credits, but not PayPal, etc), and credits were actually worth way less than actual cash and you never knew how much less until way later.

See, Facebook offered similar incentives as Amazon here: free promotional Facebook credits to get people using the system, bonus credits for larger orders, etc. However, those credits were marked as "promotional" internally, and if you accepted promotionial FB credits, you didn't get any money. That's right, the game devs ate the cost of promoting FB credits. Plus, you had no idea if you were accepting promotional FB credits or real ones, or if certain big companies got a sweeter deal on getting a higher real/promotional balance, AND you didn't know how many of your credits were real or promotional until the balance report came in, making it kind of difficult to identify just how much money you'd actually earned.

Now maybe Amazon will eat their promotional costs themselves here, but to any dev considering implementing this, be wary, and read everything. I know that's standard advice, obviously, but it should be especially so with your cashflow, and I'm personally wary as fuck about this, given just how similar to FB credits it appears.

Turns out I can take them to coinstar at the local Krogers and turn them into cash but they will take a chunk of the change that I am too miserly to part with.

OR, wow, I can turn them into an Amazon gift card! I mean, I can turn them into Home Depot cards (and many other cards), but I live in an apartment.

So that's awesome and I test it with $20 in quarters, AND, AND, AND,

Machine almost instantly jams.

No one uses the coinstar except for the most part as trash can so when the manager rips the machine apart we find safety pins, and buttons, and all sorts of crap.

Oh well.

Hey, the coinstar.com tells me Walmart has a machine too. Let's check that out and and and -- the walmart machines don't allow conversion to Amazon money. My guess is that Amazon is Walmarts biggest enemy.

Oh well. I now have about $180 of loose change.

I see: ref_=tsm_1_fb_s_uk_mwnu2i

Probably harmless. Just curious.