Coke Studios ThereBucks Glut?

Last week I had someone selling ThereBucks to me that I'd never heard of before. Not that unusual. What WAS somewhat unusual was a There employee telling me not to pay this person because they were selling converted Coke Studios currency or something, and There hadn't determined whether this was okay or not.

My immediate thoughts were...this is completely stupid. I'd never even visited Coke Studios, which I guess was a Coca Cola version of There.com, but apparently they decided to close down the separate world and merge the users in with There Classic. In order to be fair about this, they converted any furniture or other assets that people owned in Coke Studios into an equivalent amount of ThereBucks (although how they figured out an equivalent, I don't know.) Now they were telling me that people who are not identified as former Coke Studios members, who have ThereBucks that look and spend just like regular ThereBucks, which were in reimbursement for items that apparently had that same value in Coke Studios and that SOMEONE had paid for, whether it was Coke themselves or the users or whatever...that these mysteriously different and yet not different ThereBucks might be something I shouldn't buy even though I can't tell where users get their ThereBucks from? The long arm of There might come down and snatch these ThereBucks back out of my account? Outrageous!

Happily, since then it seems they came to the same conclusion I did...if it looks like a ThereBuck and quacks like a ThereBuck, it MUST BE a ThereBuck, and former Coke Studio members should be allowed to do whatever they like with them, even if a small amount of that ends up looking like gaming the system. You can hardly call it that, though, unless Coke Studios members had some kind of crystal ball letting them know that one day this would happen and they'd have a bunch of ThereBucks they could then sell to little ol' me.

The main result of this, other than me breathing a big sigh of relief that I don't have to be paranoid about buying from There members that are unknown to me seems to be that there is now a bit of a glut of ThereBucks in the market. I have more people selling to me than buying from me. I don't think it will last too long, but it has some impact on any Christmas shopping I might otherwise do. I've got my funds tied up in ThereBucks. Bah humbug!