Pudding Cups: Better Travel Rewards than Chase Reserve
Meet David Phillips.
David is a civil engineer that teaches at UC Davis, but mostly he’s a world traveler and the undisputed king of pudding cups.
Back in 1999, Healthy Choice ran a promotion: for every 10 bar codes you mail in, receive 500 airline miles.
Get it done in the first month, and they’ll double it — 1,000 miles for 10 bar codes. This piqued David’s interest enough for him to take a trip to the local discount grocery store for a quick ROI calculation. David hit the jackpot in the form of $0.25 pudding cups. For those keeping score at home, that means
$0.0025/mile.
At this point, it’s on like Donkey Kong. David went to all 10 locations this company had in the immediate area and spent $3,000 on pudding cups. He went in to every single store and asked to buy every single pudding cup in the store, including the inventory in the back. He even had one manager order him 60 cases from their distributor. If anyone asked why, he told them he was stocking up for Y2K so he wouldn’t have any competitors.
So now he has his pudding cups. Next, he just has to send them in. $3,000 dollars of pudding means 12,000 bar codes to peel. He got blisters peeling the bar codes, and all of his friends and family got sick of eating pudding. David comes in with another strong move.
He donated all of the remaining pudding to the local Salvation Army, with the stipulation that they peel the bar codes and return them to him. Now, he had all of his bar codes, no more pudding to force on his kids, and a cool $800 tax deduction for his large donation. The pudding cups alone came out to 1.2 million airline miles, plus some chump change he tacked on from soup.
This would already be a happy ending,
American Airlines aka Bricc Airlines awards AAdvantage Gold Club status to anyone that manages to rack up a million miles, which David had. This is a lifetime status that gives him all the perks you would expect — priority boarding, a concierge, upgrades, bonus miles, etc. He now somehow earns miles faster than he can spend them and continues to find ways to snag undervalued miles. He apparently checks websites that research opportunities like this every day and cashes in on the most lucrative deals.
As of fall 2013, he had 4 million miles (couldn’t find a more recent number, but basically he’s not going to run out). David and his family have traveled to dozens of countries and David even buys flights for his friends to join them on their trips. From what I’ve read, this wasn’t actually costly for Healthy Choice or American Airlines. AA sold the miles to Healthy Choice ahead of time, so they were fine there. It’s reasonable to think the Healthy Choice, who ended up indirectly selling the miles to David at a loss, profited off of the publicity the story earned.
To learn how to become a thrifty globetrotter like David, follow the steps at the bottom of this article:
And if all else fails, fly United.
