So, Amex has a great program wherein you accumulate a point for every dollar you spend. These points are then redeemable for, principally, travel benefits like free rooms, free car rentals, free airfare, or free upgrades to first class; Mrs Heathen and I used these points to fly in First to San Francisco for our honeymoon, for example.
As it happens, it's also possible to redeem these points for goods via any of a number of catalogs that show up in our mailbox from time to time. Usually, these merch deals are curiously bad ones; $400 items for, say, 50,000 points or more (airfare can be had for 25K points, for example).
Comes now, then, the First Collection, a fancy catalog of very high-end items available in exchange for truly unreasonable point totals; it includes high-end Bourdeaux for 30K to 50K per bottle, for example. The particular item that prompted this post, however is a 12-month lease on a Lamborghini Gallardo for 9.5 million points.
It's funny on the face of it, clearly, but then you realize it's aspirational marketing. No one will redeem his points for this. Just having it in the catalog makes the catalog fancier, and helps emphasize the luxe aspects of the Amex program as well as, to a point, Lambo. But it's still funny.
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