The Even Greater Tokyo Region

Show us your Beans

It may sound odd, but one of my most lasting childhood memories has to do with coffee. I have Dutch parents, so this makes it a little less odd. Sometimes from the age of 4-ish I would ask my parents for a 'kinder-koffie' which looking back was just warm sugary milk with just enough coffee to make it taste terrible.

But although I myself didn't actively start drinking coffee till I was 16 1/2, coffee was a huge part of my childhood. Several times per day, I'd make my parents a coffee and myself a hot chocolate. It was just the way things were. However, we almost never had real coffee - it would pretty much always be instant coffee - and it would always be Nescafe Classic.

Being a devoted coffee drinker now, I get it now too. Instant coffee in general taste like crap. The cheaper brands remind me of cheap rum, and even the more expensive brands don't give that satisfying coffee feeling. But when you open a pack of Nescafe, the real coffee smell wafts through the air and it makes me feel happy to be alive.

My parents would always collect the Nescafe Beans, and we had a vast collection of classic red Nescafe mugs as a result, so when I returned back to New Zealand last year I also began collecting the beans. After drinking one kilo of instant coffee I decided to cash them in. Surely my efforts would have paid off. What could I get? Mugs? Towels? More coffee?

I signed onto the website. It is a bit disappointing that the beans reward system is all done online now, and you don't even have to cut out those little beans anymore either. This should have been a sign of things to come. It was a flashy website that took forever to load, but eventually I was signed up and I entered in all my beans. 1000 bean points! That sounded promising. However, when I went to cash them in, the only rewards you could get were a video store voucher for 50 bean points, a discount for an AA membership for 50 points, a discount for a Navi for 50 points, or something to do with Ezibuy - whatever the hell that is - for 50 points. They don't even do mugs anymore. Nescafe points are basically now an alternative for advertising on the back of grocery receipts. I was deeply disappointed, I would get nothing for all my coffee-drinking efforts.



The only other option was to donate the points to charity - 500 points for 5 dollars.


So in the end, I pretty much drank a kilo of coffee to help children... children with diseases. I am not the charitable type, primarily because I am poor. But it would have been nice if I had of known last year that each time I drank a cup of coffee I was curing a sick child. Not only would each coffee have been delicious and relaxing, I could have improved the experience with the smugness you get when you donate to charity.

It would be nice if other vices had charitable incentives. For example, if you eat 20 kilos of butter, you can donate to saving the rain forests. Or for each carton of cigarettes Camel gives prophylactics to hookers in Thailand. Or for season of Jersey Shore you watch, they offer to remove neck tattoos of released convicts so they can re-enter society without reoffending. It's just a thought. Either that or give me a stupid mug, Nescafe!