Qdoba Rewards ('app' and new rewards system) review

Okay, all o' y'all — particularly those of you griping (justifiably, I might add) about the increased 'prices' to redeem points for the free entrée — please listen. Or read, if you don't have text-to-speech turned on.

Additionally, a believe-it-or-don't disclaimer before I get started here: I don't work for Qdoba, I had no hand in designing this "app" of theirs, nor in designing their new rewards system (in my opinion, the old one worked just fine ¯\(º_O)/¯). I'm just telling it how I see things.

All right. Now that that's out of the way: Qdoba's new rewards system sucks for the first three visits, but it DOES — slowly — get better.

Instead of it being a simple, "Earn 1000 points at 10 points per dollar and you'll get a free entrée" deal — as it used to be — it has changed so that you can redeem your points on pretty much whatever you want: cookies, brownies, chips and queso or guacamole, burritos, tacos… anything.

However, it also has "tiers" now, based on how many visits — presumably one per day — you've made to Qdoba: for your first 3 visits ("Recruit" tier), you don't get any special perks, but you DO earn 10 points per dollar spent, just like ye olden days of about two weeks ago (as of this posting) and before.

For your next six visits (4-9 visits total; the "Apprentice" tier), you still earn only 10 points per dollar, but you also get the perk of "100 bonus points on every order with a minimum purchase of 99¢" — which is pretty good. It is, subjectively-speaking, the best perk they have — value-wise. Unless you really love chips and queso.

For the fifteen visits after THAT (10-24 visits total; the "Pro" tier), you'll now earn FIFTEEN points per dollar, and you unlock the perk of "$2 Chips and Queso with every order with minimum purchase". That perk is rubbish, though; fortunately, once you hit the Pro tier, you can click a 'Switch Perk' button to change your perk. I recommend switching back to the "100 bonus points" perk ASAP.

Then, for visit #25 and onward (the "Champ" tier), you'll earn TWENTY points per dollar, and you get the same perk as the previous tier ("$2 Chips and Queso") — PLUS a monthly 'mystery perk'. But — mystery perk aside —, as I said before, the $2-Chips-and-Queso perk is awful, so keep track of your reward tier, and check what perk is selected once you hit the "Champ" tier. If they switch your perk to the "Champ" tier's perks (as I'm sure they automatically will), switch back to the 100-bonus-points-per-purchase perk.

Congratulations! Once you hit the "Champ" tier, as long as you're using the perk you got from the "Apprentice" tier — the 100-bonus-points one — you will now effectively be getting roughly 300 points per visit, assuming you regularly pay about $10 each time you buy full-price stuff at Qdoba (and I do; Qdoba burritos all cost about ten bucks each here)

If your account is set to the "Recruit" tier, it'll take 15 total visits — assuming you also activate the "Apprentice" tier's perk as soon as it's available, and switch back to it once you hit the "Pro" tier — to get enough points for a free entrée. That's 50% more visits than it took on the old system, but AFTER that, it'll only take 12 visits (bringing you up to about 3150 points, total, for those 12 visits), and after your 27th visit, you'll be back to needing only 10 visits to accrue enough points to get a free entrée.

Now, it obviously isn't perfect. The old system was a lot simpler. A lot of people are also currently wondering where their points (at the very least, the bonus 1400 points they were promised) went. I couldn't tell you, but somehow it worked just fine for me; I hit the Login button, "re" created my account, and all of my points were there, including the 600 points I'd had already on their old system. Thanks to the 1400 points they added to pre-existing users, I now have 2000.

As far as the "app" not letting you sign in, throwing errors and such about something 'going wrong', or not being able to connect to the Internet: this "app" was extremely hyped, and it's possible that Qdoba's servers were unprepared for the deluge of traffic with which they were consequently bombarded. Give it a while; this system's probably not going anywhere… not for at least another two or three years, anyway. (That's how long the previous — Qdoba's first — rewards system lasted.)

tl;dr: yeah, the new rewards system kinda sucks if you don't already have plenty of visits and/or points under your belt. It's a "devotion"-based system; the more times you go, the better stuff you get. Except that it starts out worse than the old system, and doesn't get to being AS GOOD AS the old system until you've went there 27+ times, AND only use the perk from the second reward tier.

I sincerely hope that Qdoba doesn't ever reset people's levels after they hit the top tier, though. Their Valentine's Day buy-one,-get-one-free deal and the free birthday entrée (at least, I HOPE it's still a free entrée) will be the only things really worth bothering with after that — at least, when you don't usually have the money to splurge on paying ten (or more) dollars on a single meal.