Introducing Extreme Stacking (and our new Lab Manager)

The other day I wanted to use one of my 1800Flowers gift cards to send flowers to a friend.  And, believe it or not, I couldn’t remember the best current promo code to use for the order.  So, I hunted around this website to find my latest posts about 1800Flowers and then scanned through to find the promo codes.  It occurred to me then that it would be great to have one place to go to find all of the info needed to maximize rewards when making a purchase.  That’s how “Extreme Stacking” got started.

I emailed Shawn (author of most of our Quick Deals and other resources on this site) and Anita (our new Lab Manager – more on that below) to see what they thought about the idea.  For lack of a better term, I called it a “portal portal”.  I imagined a little mascot that would shout “Portal Portal!” in commercials.

Shawn and Anita liked the idea, so I started working on it.  To avoid a pizza related lawsuit, I proposed a few new titles such as “Extreme Shopping,” “Extreme Stacking,” “Double Dip Portal,” and “Triple Dip Shopping” (that was my favorite).  I even came up with a logo for each one, like this:

But, despite my best drawing skills, Shawn and Anita preferred the name “Extreme Stacking.”  Two against one.  Done.  So, I set to work on a new logo, and produced this (actually Microsoft Powerpoint produced it, but I supervised):

Introducing Extreme Stacking

In addition to creating a logo, I created a home page and a few detail pages.  And, I updated a few older stacking related posts to link to.  I think we now have a solid start.  Click to see the new page:

While I certainly wouldn’t call this page “done”, I think there’s enough there to be worth checking out.  I’m sure this will change a lot in the coming days and weeks.

Let me know what you think.  What would you like added or changed?

Introducing our new Lab Manager

Hopefully you’re familiar with the Frequent Miler Laboratory.  If not, please take a moment to click over there and check it out…

Back yet?  OK, so I recently asked a friend named Anita to take over management of this page.  She has two primary responsibilities:

1. Keep the Lab table up to date.  As people report new experiment results, she has been adding that info to the Lab table.  This is great because I used to let those things sit around for up to a month before updating the table.  Now, the table is much more up to date than before.
2. Run experiments.  As we identify areas that aren’t well covered in the Lab table already, Anita’s role is to conduct experiments to fill in the gaps.  So far she has run several Target related experiments (and will report the results soon).  If you have suggestions for experiments, please write your suggestions as comments on the Frequent Miler Laboratory page.

Please join me in welcoming Anita to the team!

The Frequent Miler Laboratory and Extreme Stacking pages go hand in hand.  The Laboratory provides the information we need: what works and what doesn’t.  The Extreme Stacking pages show how to put it all together.

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.