Man buys 12,150 pudding cups for 1.2 million flier miles, tax write-offs

Normally I won’t paste an entire article like this, but when the author didn’t include a source link, I did some googling. This happened back in 1999/2000 (hence the bad photo quality, too, I’m guessing) and Snopes has some more details about it, confirming its truth. 

David Philips of Davis, CA spent $3,100 on individual pudding cups and earned himself more than 1.2 million frequent flier miles! How? Healthy Choice offered 500 frequent flier miles for every 10 Universal Product Codes (bar codes) submitted by the end of the year. Even better? The offer was doubled through the end of month. A civil engineer, Philips looked at the math: entrees were only $2, cans of soup were $0.90 — but it wasn’t until Philips stumbled into a warehouse outlet store that he discovered individual pudding cups for $0.25 a piece, each outfitted with its own barcode — can you say "jackpot"?

Philips cleaned the grocery outlet out of their pudding cups, and proceeded to clean out every single chain from Fresno to Davis -  including asking his local supermarket to order an additional 60 cases of pudding! All in all, Philips collected 12,150 individual pudding cups and barcodes, filling his garage and living room with cases and cases of pudding.

But there’s a problem: the deadline for double miles was fast approaching, and Philips had to rip all of the barcodes off all 12,150 cups and mail them to Healthy Choice. So what did he do? He donated almost the entire lot to the Salvation Army in exchange for help removing the barcodes! The charity happily agreed, having never received such a large donation from a single person, and Philips mailed in his barcodes.

The reimbursement envelopes from Healthy Choice started pouring in — 2,506 certificates in all, each good for 500 miles, totaling 1,253,000 miles. Under the terms and conditions of the promotion, Philips could transfer the miles to any airline account, so he split 216,000 evenly between Delta, United and Northwest airlines and kept the rest – all 1,037,000 – in his American Airlines account. By earning more than 1,000,000 frequent flier miles, Philips earned AAdvantage Gold status for life, with all of its crazy perks, including more bonus miles for every trip.

So by spending $3,150 on pudding, Philips earned enough miles for 31 round-trip tickets to Europe (or 42 trips to Hawai’i, 21 to Australia or 50 anywhere in the US), which breaks down to about $100 per ticket — awesome deal right? It gets better – because Philips donated the pudding, he can write-off a little more than $800, bringing the cost down to $75 per round-trip ticket to Europe.

Pretty awesome, huh?