3 of the 5 main food groups. Starch, oil and salt. All you need is sugar and alcohol for a complete meal. 
Not yet. There are too many personal offers that I have available so that I have never needed the business credit card offers although I could get those too. I honestly have so many free plane tickets at this point that I can’t even use them all so I stopped taking new ones. I will cycle back as soon as I use the benefits I have.
I was skeptical about the whole idea until someone at work taught me how to do it. He is way more advanced than I am (he gets everything including hotel suites and 1st class tickets for free; I have seen him work it, it is legit). I learned a modified version of the same thing but I take coach seats and regular hotel rooms also for free. It is slightly less work that way. It takes me about 15 minutes total time to score a free trip to anywhere in North America or the Caribbean and I have done it consistently for years.
You have to have a decent income, financial discipline and a really good credit score for that strategy to work but it certainly does if you meet those criteria and know how to play the game. All it involves is simple online applications and online booking for your trip as soon as you qualify. You just cancel the card as soon as they try to charge you anything for it. Cycle back through all the banks in roughly two year cycles to start fresh again.
Arby’s used to do this with their Beef-n-Cheddars (probably neither beef nor cheddar, but they are delicious), but now they’ve switched to a turnover or something that I don’t like. I had lots of Beef-n-Cheddars for the price of a single BnC a few years ago.
For some dumb reason this strikes me as funny. You didn’t buy anything, you didn’t give them any money, yet you want a receipt.
Do you ask for a receipt when you ask for change for a buck?
How about when you stop and ask for directions?
When you were a kid did you demand a receipt when you went trick or treating?
The only thing better than Mickey D fries is FREE Mickey D fries!
You’ve got sugar. McDonalds supposedly soaks their fries in sugar water so they’ll fry up to that golden color.
My hero for these kinds of stories is the guy who, in 1999, saw that Healthy Choice was running a promo: for every 10 bar codes of their product a person sent in, they’d be awarded 500 air miles on any of the then-major airlines. And there was even a promo-within-the-promo: anyone who redeemed the offer within the first month would get double that – 1000 air miles for buying 10 Healthy Choice products.
And he found single-serve pudding cups on sale for 25 cents apiece. $2.50 for 1000 miles – not a bad deal, yes?
So he drove around buying up every single one of those he could find, and because he didn’t want word to get out, he dropped hints he was stocking up for Y2K. He got so many that he couldn’t physically peel off the bar codes for all of them in time… so he worked out a deal with local food banks: he’d donate the pudding if they’d get volunteers to peel off the barcodes.
He spent $3000 on pudding – but got over a million miles with American Airlines, qualifying him for “Lifetime” Gold-level access. He’s flown with his whole family all over the world for free.
And he got the tax-writeoff for the charitable donation of pudding. 
I agree. McDonald’s Cokes haven’t been the same since they stopped adding beef tallow.
Interesting. At the Arby’s I worked at, if the sandwich was from a survey code, it didn’t print out a new receipt. The best you could do was half your sandwiches free.
If it has a coupon, you’re damn right I do. Besides, the counterperson thrust it at me, so why would I refuse?
Legally, if I walked out with some salable product in my hand but no receipt, I could be challenged as having stolen it, so giving the customer a receipt is standard business procedure.
He was certainly a pioneer but another man even beat that stunt several times over in 2005. The U.S. Mint was launching dollar coins and wanted to get as many of them into circulation as possible sold it sold them at face value on its web site - free shipping and accepted credit cards. You can probably see where this is going.
"The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 sought to put dollar coins into circulation by allowing citizens to buy the coins directly from the Mint’s website at face value. Shipping was free, and the website accepted credit cards.
So [Brad] Wilson pulled out his rewards card and bought nearly $3 million in coins.
Not all at once, of course. But over the course of eight months, he would have thousands of dollars in coins delivered at a time, then walk them into the bank and deposit them into his account. Then he would use the money to pay off his credit card bill in full. He was essentially moving money in a circle: putting thousands of dollars in charges at a time on his card, then using the cash he “bought” to pay the bill."
He ended up getting 4 million hotel and airline miles that way.
Chains in the Craftworks family often have similar receipt deals. Take the survey and get a $10 off appetizers with any entree purchase. They have several appetizers which I can make a meal out of, so for two people and drinks, at a place with $15-20 entrees, we’ll get out for $30 including (a generous) tip. I’ve chained three or four of these together in a row.
The best deal I ever did though was more of a mini version of Shagnasty’s travel rewards. For a while in the early 2000s Frontier Airlines and Vail Resorts were partnered, so that 2000 miles on Frontier could be converted to enough Vail points to get a free lift ticket. Lift tickets were about $90 at the time and flights on Frontier were $2-400 and cost 15,000 miles (I think). Anyway, from a purely dollar stand point it was way better to convert points and get lift tickets. Plus, I’d ski 10 times a year, and maybe take one personal flight.
The credit card which gave 10,000 miles plus one mile for every dollar meant I skied for free at Vail and Beaver Creek for several years.
It still seems funny!
I think that may be an option in those new machines they have now…
Somehow it worked out one time that my father had coupons (tripled, since he was in CT at the time) which combined with a sale price gave him some modest number of free boxes of microwave popcorn. He may have even been paid a few cents to take them away. Then it began. Inside each box was another such coupon. He bought eight at a time, sending my mom through a separate line, and waiting for cashier shifts to change so as not to embarrass himself (too late?). Suffice it to say, he acquired 96 boxes of free popcorn until he went back and they had removed the display.
Don’t get me started on the day there was a barrelful of Cadbury eggs on sale for five cents each.
If I had the guts, this idea would be my next video project.
This was a plot element of the 2002 Paul Thomas Anderson film Punch Drunk Love.
Aw, c’mon. Do it! The looks on the cashiers faces would be priceless.
Especially if you add just stopping in to use the restroom and then ask for a receipt!
All these scams that stick it to The Man and Big Fries, Big Pudding, and Big Airline industries get the drewtwo99 seal of approval.
I had heard about that mint scam a while back and was so sad that I missed it.
Shagnasty, I think you are my personal hero and I hope someday my credit score is good enough to do that. I recently got an airline credit card that I actually use, but to get any miles from it I had to make like $2000 worth of purchases first (which I did, but immediately paid off so that I never paid a cent of interest). No annual fee either for it, which is nice.
Doesn’t it hurt your credit score to be opening and closing so many new credit card accounts though?
This is really disgusting. How many receipts does it take to get free bypass surgery?
Musicat, can you update us on your scheme and/or health? Have you been getting countless free fries since you discovered this method?