McWinning with Monopoly
Now that this year’s McDonald’s Monopoly contest has ended, I thought I’d share our results. We got interested in the contest after my husband read this post. Since the Best Buy bucks were guaranteed for the write-in entry method, it sounded like a can’t-lose contest. After some discussion and a fair amount of rule-reading, we decided to send in 150 entries.
Our total cost for entries came to $119.82—$2.82 for 300 envelopes, and $117.00 for 300 stamps. We don’t normally do mail-in sweepstakes entries, so we had some second thoughts as were spending all that money on stamps. Was this a bad idea? What if we did something wrong and didn’t get any of our entries back?
But it worked out pretty well for us. Here’s what we won:
- $224 Best Buy Bucks (19 $5 pieces + 129 $1 pieces)
- $69.32 in food prizes
- 17 small soft drink/coffee coupons (Average Retail Value $1 each)
- 7 medium fry coupons (ARV $1.11)
- 12 breakfast sandwich coupons (ARV $2.02)
- 8 small mcflurry coupons (ARV $2.10)
- 1 breakfast extra value meal (ARV $3.51)
- 15 free phone game downloads
- 28 free ring tone downloads
- 72 Snapfish coupons for 25 free photos each
We were a little disappointed that we didn’t win any of the bigger prizes—we’d really hoped that this many entries would earn us at least one of the $50 wins. But with an investment of $119.82, we almost doubled our money—and that’s only counting the Best Buy wins. We had a lot of fun (and probably gained a pound or two) driving to every McDonald’s in a 5-mile radius getting all of the goodies. And you can’t beat having 1800 photo prints (with free shipping!) at your disposal. Christmas gifts for the whole family, perhaps?
The only real problem we had is that we got a late start. We didn’t send in our first entries until October 19th—which means we didn’t receive our game pieces in time to enter all of them online (they only allow 10 online entries per day per person). And we really had to rush to use all our free food coupons—we had just over 2 weeks to get all that food. It kinda reminded us of that Supersize Me movie.
But as long as the rules stay the same, we’ll definitely do this again next year. We’ll just get an earlier start.
After all, we’d hate to miss out on winning more free photos!
