The pudding guy

[Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org>]

--------------

David Phillips, a civil engineer at UC-Davis, has become a cult hero in
the obsessive subculture of people who collect frequent-flier miles by
parlaying $3,150 worth of pudding into 1.2 million miles. Oh, yeah -
he's also going to claim an $815 tax write-off.

Last May, Phillips was pushing his shopping cart down the frozen-food
aisle of his local supermarket when a promotion on a Healthy Choice
frozen entree caught his eye: He could earn 500 miles for every 10 UPCs
from Healthy Choice products he sent to the company by Dec. 31. Even
better: Any UPCs mailed by the end of the month would rack up double the
mileage, or 1,000 miles for every 10 labels.

"I started doing the math, and I realized that this was a great deal," he
said. "I wanted to take my family to Europe this summer, and this could
be the way." Frozen entrees were about $2 apiece, but a few aisles away
Phillips found cans of Healthy Choice soups at 90 cents each. He filled
his cart with them, and then headed to his local Grocery Outlet, a
warehouse-style discount store. And there he hit the mother lode. "They
had individual servings of chocolate pudding for 25 cents a piece," he
said. "And each serving had its own bar code on it. I did some more math
and decided to escalate my plans."

Phillips cleaned the store out - bought every last cup of pudding in the
warehouse. He then asked the manager for the addresses of all the other
Grocery Outlets in the Central Valley and, with his mother-in-law riding
shotgun in his van, spent a weekend scouring the shelves of every store
from Davis to Fresno. "There were 10 stores in all," he said. "Luckily,
most of them were right off the freeway." He filled his garage to the
rafters with chocolate pudding and stacked additional cases in his
living room. But, Phillips wasn't finished yet - he had the manager of
his local Grocery Outlet order him 60 more cases. "A few days later I
went out behind the store," he said, "and there were two whole pallets
of chocolate pudding with my name on them." All in all, he'd purchased
12,150 individual servings of pudding.

Around this time, Phillips began to reveal his scheme to fellow readers
of the Webflyer Web site
<http://www.webflyer.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/002003.html> account under
the name "Pudding Guy." Phillips' tale was met with skepticism, if not
outright disbelief, until he uploaded photos of his haul. They're still
there, at <http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm> But then Pudding Guy
discovered he had a problem on his hands: The deadline for earning
double miles was quickly approaching, and there was simply no way
Phillips and his wife could tear off all those bar codes in time.

"I had to come up with something to do with all that pudding, fast" he
said. Phillips trucked the pudding to two local food banks and the
Salvation Army, which agreed to tear off the bar codes in exchange for
the food donation. "We'd never seen anything like it," said Larry
Hostetler, community relations director for the Sacramento Salvation
Army. "We've gotten some big donations, but always from companies and
institutions, not individual people." Phillips got his bar codes in the
mail in time to beat the deadline, and then held his breath. The
promotion specifically said I could get the miles for any Healthy Choice
product," he said. "But still, it seemed like there was a good chance
they'd get me on some technicality."

But then packages - large packages - started arriving in the mail from
Healthy Choice. In all, they contained 2,506 certificates, each good for
500 miles. That's 1,253,000 miles. Under the terms of the promotion,
Phillips could have the mileage posted in any airline account. He split
216,000 between his United, Delta and Northwest accounts and posted the
rest - 1,037,000 miles- to his American Airlines account. By surpassing
the million-mile mark, Pudding Guy now has AAdvantage Gold status for
life, entitling him to a special reservations number, priority boarding,
upgrades and bonus miles.

While we talked on the phone, Pudding Guy did a little math - as you
might have noticed by now, he's very, very good at math - and figured
out that scheme netted him enough miles for 31 round-trip coach tickets
to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii, or 21 tickets to Australia, or 50
tickets anywhere in the U.S. "Wow - 31 trips to Europe for a little over
$3,000," I said. "That's less than $100 a ticket." "Oh, it's better than
that," Phillips said. "Since I gave the pudding to charity I can take a
tax write-off of $815. So that brings the cost of a ticket to Europe
down to $75."

As it turns out, Pudding Guy didn't donate all his stash to the food
banks. He kept about 100 servings for himself, and he's just about
finished them. "Actually," he said, "I really like the stuff."

At this point, two things seem clear: It will be a very long time before
David Phillips will have to pay for another airline ticket. And it will
be even longer before the poor and homeless people in the Sacramento
area will want to see another cup of chocolate pudding.

--------------

(source unknown)

Greg
-- 
Gregory S. Sutter                    Black holes were created
mailto:gsutter@zer0.org              when God divided by zero.
http://www.zer0.org/~gsutter/ 
PGP DSS public key 0x40AE3052
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