The New Bones Club Card

One element of the game I'm running is the Bones Club card. Every time I make a purchase from Smokey Bones a point is added to my card for every dollar I spend. When I rack up 200 points SB applies a $20 credit to my account, so it becomes in effect a $20 gift card. That sounds like a 10% discount, right? It would be, except when you first activate a Bones Club card online you get an automatic 100 points, so the first $100 you spend earns a $20 gift card, which is a 20% discount. Follow me?

My card hit 200 points last week, and I used my $20 credit to buy lunch on Monday and Tuesday. I have $4.00 credit left after that, but I picked up lunch for Sergio today, so I wanted to be sure to apply that purchase to the Bones Club card since it's more than I usually spend. However, I didn't want to apply it to the card I already have; I wanted a new card with the automatic 100-point balance.

I asked Frankie, the hostess who took my order today, if I could get a new card. She asked me if I had lost my old card, and I said that I hadn't, I just wanted a new one. So she gave it to me! She's clearly obvlivous to my strategy.

She applied the 17-point credit to the card, but I still have to activate it, and this presents a dilemma. To create the account I have to provide an email address. Of course I have several active addresses other than the one I used on my first card, but I'm going to need to do this many, many times if I expect Smokey Bones to take me seriously. I could create new accounts as I need them, but this seems to me inelegant. Instead I'm hoping to use the username+suffix@gmail.com format to create multiple Bones Club accounts. Could their machines be smart enough to recognize that it's actually an address on file for another account? I suppose its possible, but then again, what do they do for people who legitimately lose their cards and need to open new accounts. I think this will work, but if it doesn't I stand to lose today's 17 points altogether. That would be quite a setback!

I doubt I'll work up the courage to activate this account until the last minute, which will probably come at 11:45 one week from today. That will be the next time I need the new card, since I'll use my last $4.00 credit on Friday, and I'll be in Greenville on Monday and Tuesday. If anyone has suggestions on what to use for an email address I'll welcome them.