Sunday, June 12, 2011

Man gets (nearly) free air miles for life

While not new news or anything of the sort, this is still a fun little bit of trivia and seemed like a good way to kick this blog off.

Back in 1999 Healthy Choice ran a promotion to earn airline miles for purchasing their products. David Phillips ran the numbers and quickly realized how great of a deal it really was after noticing that every cup of pudding had it's own UPC.

After hitting up all of his local stores and making some special orders he had amassed a total of 12,150 cups of pudding costing him about $3,000. After turning in all of his labels he was able to redeem over 1.2 million airline miles. That's enough to fly from the U.S.A. to Europe about 31 times.

But what do you do with over 12,000 cups of pudding over taking your house? Donate them to charity for a tax-write off of course. A write-off worth over $800, nearly 1/3 of his original investment.

You can read more about David here.

11 comments:

  1. Ha yeah I heard about this, I'm sure when I read about it the article mentioned that this even inspired a film! I don't remember the title of it though.

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  2. They used the concept in "Drunk Punch Love" with Adam Sandler.

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  3. Wow, that's crazy.
    They should do this kind of offer again, haha.

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  4. Roundabout way to cheat the system!

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  5. cheater
    aiuehahaha

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  6. Smart cookie... I bet healthy choice, or any other company for that matter, never ran a promotion like this again after realizing how flawed it was.

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