a monday of why didn’t i think of that?

we watched punch drunk love last night. it was weird. but halfway through the show, mitch realized that he had heard the pudding plot somewhere before.

a little googling later, and we found this:

“David Phillips (born 1964), also called The Pudding Guy,^[1] is an American civil engineer best known for accumulating many frequent flyer miles by taking advantage of a promotion by Healthy Choice Foods in 1999 that which offered 500 miles for every 10 bar-code labels sent in by Dec. 31. An early-bird special offered double the mileage–1,000 miles for every 10 bar codes submitted by May 31.

Phillips calculated that the return on a mail-in food promotion outweighed the price of the Healthy Choice frozen entrees. He later discovered the same promotion also included individual pudding packages at 25 cents a piece. He subsequently visited ten grocery stores in the Sacramento area, buying every case of pudding available, in the end, totaling 12,150 individual servings of pudding,^[2] for $3,140.^[3] In order to divert attention, he claimed he was stocking up for Y2K.^[4] The details of the promotion included a bonus if the packages were mailed during the month of May 1999; Phillips, unable to remove all the UPC codes himself in such a short time, recruited members of the Salvation Army to help peel the UPC codes off the puddings in exchange for the donation of the pudding.^[5]

In May 1999, Phillips received 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles, enough for thirty-one round trips from his home in California to Europe, 50 roundtrip flights anywhere in the United States, 21 trips to Australia and back, or 31 trips to Europe–worth, by Phillips’ count, as much as $150,000.

Since he gave most of the pudding to charity, Phillips also received a $815 tax write-off.^[4]”

wikipedia source

why didn’t i think of that?