Originally Posted by
ExitRowAisle
Without some creative ways of "beating the system", a person has only had the opportunity to buy $8,500 of coins to date ($500 for 7 Presidents and $5,000 on the new Native American coin). Currently, you can't even order all 7 Presidents -- so a $20,000 spend seems to be out of reach on this program for the moment.
Furthermore, there are a lot of people ordering $500 at a time, and it blows my mind that they are deeming the return worth the risk+cost. Not everyone values miles/points the same, but the mean range for FTers is around 1.5 to 2 cents per mile/point. Lets assume 2 even. For $500 worth of coins, you are getting a $10 payout for the time it takes you to place the order, track and receive the order, and deal with cashing in the coins (whether this is a drive to the bank, specially handling them for tips, or whatever). Add the perceived risk is of an order or delivery gone bad, the time needed to rectify such a problem, and the risk of having a valuable stash of coins on hand, and I simply don't see how so many people deem it worthwhile. Even if you deem the risks minimal, you can see by simply reading this thread that there are a plethora of complications that may arise that require time to work through. Even if you are lucky and everything goes smoothly, if you are spending just 20 minutes of total time to deal with the process, you are making $30/hour. This might be worth the time to some people, but represents a best-case scenario. Opportunities like 500 miles for a 2-minute survey or $18 for a case of Fiji water and 2,500 miles make sense, but $10 worth of miles for the hassle and risk of dealing with $500 worth of coins... I don't get it.