Pallets
of Chocalate from The Pudding Guy
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 Universal Product Codes (bar codes) from Healthy Choice products
he sent to the company by Dec.31. Even better Any bar codes mailed
by he end of the month would rack up double the mileage, or 1,000
miles for very 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 apiece, "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 Outlet 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.flyertalk.com/),
where he posted an account under the name "Pudding Guy."
Phillips' tale was met with skepticism, if not
outright dis-belief, 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 Advantage 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 night 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."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the San Francisco Examiner
{And thanks to Steve Kilbride}
Thanks
to http://www.huumor.com
