Thank you for participating in the Bike Angels rewards program. Changes to point values for claiming a gift card reward are in line with our efforts to ensure the health and fairness of the program for all Bike Angels. Bike Angel rewards are intended to create community while helping out fellow riders. In addition to new gift card and charitable contribution reward options, we’re excited to continue offering valuable membership extensions, ebike minutes, and Lyft rideshare credits to Bike Angels.
Is there any way you can go into Tremendous and enable some more giftcard options? None of them really work for me (I'm on the Bezos boycott train, don't use Disney, AirBnB, DoorDash, no Walmarts nearby etc.).
I only see 6 gift card options and 8 charities, but I checked out the Tremendous catalog of options and filtered by the U.S. and they have got 168 gift card options and 50 charities. For sure I'm not expecting you to enable gift cards for Uber😝 but they've got airlines, Home Depot, Lowe's, Apple, Starbucks, Harris Teeter, Kroger, H&M, Macy's, Spotify ... I could go on but you get the picture. Maybe just enable them all?
That would make it a lot easier for me to use the cards or give them as gifts to people who I know shop at certain places, I would really appreciate it.
In general, the ability to get ACH was so much better. I don't give gift cards as gifts personally either (I put cash in a red envelope Lunar New Year style) because I know how annoying they are for people to use up without just feeling like they were spent on crap. I'm sure there was fraud in NYC (I've moved enough bikes to know what's feasible in the leaderboard by a normal human who is actually trying to help the system) and those people suck, the whole point is to make the system better. I don't know if that and the NYT article are the reasons for these program changes, just putting 2 and 2 together, but if it is, wouldn't it be better to stop the cheating? Based on their leaderboards it looked like it was maybe ~12 bad people each month. There are so many more Angels nationwide than that!
Most of the people on the leaderboard are working their butts off in the middle of the night. They are not cheating.
I was referring to the people feature in the NYT article.
Yes, but most of those people had their memberships revoked. Citi bike tried to accuse me of cheating the first week of December because my bank was so large. They froze my membership and attempted to steal my bank...but when I asked them for proof to demonstrate that I was "gaming" the system, they acknowledged that they did not have any and reinstated my account. In fact...if there was a way for people to cheat, it was because of the way Citi bike had originally set up the system. In fact, that was why they introduced the streak several years ago, because it prevented people from riding back and forth. This has nothing to do with cheating. It has everything to do with corporate greed. Lyft is a for profit organization and the bike angels program was created to save them money...despite all the ridiculous jargon about creating community (since they don't want people to ride in groups/teams). Regardless of whether or not people were cheating, that does not justify the corporation's decision to cheat those of us who have saved them the expense of paying employees to move the bikes for them.
Also...Amazon keeps charging my credit card when it is set to charge my gift card...so I have spent hundreds of hours fighting over that. They do not allow you to use gift cards at Whole Foods and you can no longer purchase other gift cards or give them to others either. So...unless you want to purchase the overpriced crap on Amazon (most of which has to be returned) there are few other options. Most people who bother to earn points do not do it merely to help others. You have to pay taxes on the earnings even if you donate that income. I would rather offer free tutoring to help out children than to move bikes for a for profit organization...if I did not need the additional income between DOE assignments. This is in line with the politicians who have no respect for DEI or consideration that some of us are beyond a certain age, and are merely trying to make ends meet as we wind down our careers. Altruism (and business) is far more complicated than the idealistic younger generations comprehend.
