This guy spent $3,140 on chocolate pudding and got 1.25 MILLION free airline miles

His name is David Phillips and in May 1999 he was a 35 year old civil engineer at UC Davis when he spotted a Healthy Choice promotion
It was offering 500 frequent flyer miles for every 10 product barcodes mailed in, doubled to 1,000 miles if you mailed them in by May 31
He did the math on the cheapest Healthy Choice product he could find
Individual chocolate pudding cups were on sale at his local Grocery Outlet for 25 cents each, meaning $2.50 of pudding could buy him 1,000 airline miles
The airlines themselves valued those miles at around $20
He drove a van from store to store across California with his mother in law, cleaned out 10 different Grocery Outlets around the Sacramento area and ended up with 12,150 pudding cups stacked from his garage to his living room
When suspicious cashiers asked what he was doing he told them he was "stocking up for Y2K"
The early bird deadline was 3 weeks away and there was no way he could peel that many barcodes alone, so he called the Salvation Army and proposed a trade
He would donate all 12,150 cups if their volunteers peeled the labels off first
This donation also got him an $815 federal tax write off on top of everything
He mailed the barcodes in by the deadline and then heard absolutely nothing back for 2 months
His friends told him corporations always get out of promotions like this and his kids even started asking him if he got scammed
Then a giant package showed up at his door with paper certificates worth 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles, which made him a lifetime AAdvantage Gold member at American Airlines and was worth around $150,000 in flights
The Wall Street Journal put him on the front page in January 2000 and the London Times wrote about him a week later
Over the next 5 years he flew his entire family to 43 countries, and in 2002 director Paul Thomas Anderson loosely based the movie Punch Drunk Love on him
Adam Sandler made a movie about him and he paid for the ticket with pudding