Man purchases 12,000 cups of pudding and gets 1 million Air Miles

As you may know, Air Miles can be used for all sorts of things, like a free stay at a hotel, or a free flight. What could be better than being on a plane and sitting next to someone who bought a full-price ticket when you're travelling for free? Well, here is a man who will be able to experience this singular joy many times in his lifetime..

David Philip, a civil engineer and teacher at the University of California, can rightfully be called the king of free travel. David managed to secure free travelling for himself and his family for the rest of their lives! How does one do this? Apparently by buying ‘Healthy Choice’ chocolate pudding. Doing this led to David earning over a million Air Miles..

You're probably thinking 'What's the catch?', because buying pudding is usually not a particularly lucrative business. Well, in this case, they weren't just a few cups, but a whopping 12,150 of them. What really made all the difference however, is that David made sure to read the fine print. Healthy Choice ran a special promotion in 1999: for every 10 bar codes of their products, customers could get 500 Air Miles. But in the first month of the promotion, the Air Miles would be doubled. So David diligently scoured each and every supermarket and grocery store and finally came across a discount store where the pudding was selling for only 25 cents apiece. This meant he only had to pay $2,50 for 1000 Air Miles. Needless to say, David made sure to purchase every cup in stock at each of this store's outlets.

In total, David spent $3000 on pudding that month. Seemingly a lot, but well worth the money when you consider that earned him Air Miles worth $150,000! The next challenge came with cutting out all these bar codes: David's wife and children had blisters from peeling the bar code stickers from the cups. The solution? He contacted the local Salvation Army and offered them the pudding in exchange for their help with peeling the thousands of stickers. In the end, David managed to get the bar codes to the company before the first month expired.

David now had over a million Air Miles in his Frequent Flyer account. And this automatically qualified him for a lifelong membership to the ‘American Airlines AAdvantage Gold club’, meaning he and his family will be able to enjoy all kinds of bonuses and perks, in addition to travelling free of charge for the rest of their lives.. We will never look at pudding the same again.