I Went Dumpster Diving At Wendy’s And Bought $100,000 In Stickers—All For Airline Miles

Comedian Britt Migs explains how to earn 100,000 credit card points for “zero dollars”: buy 100 bags of dog food, type a chicken sound into your bank account, download an app called SwizzyPay, and stand in your yard yelling “Papa want pointy.” I found her video via Mommy Points and genuinely laughed pretty hard, probably because it hits a bit close to home. Every ridiculous instruction comes with absolute confidence. Don’t have a pet? Doesn’t matter. Buying all that dog food sounds expensive? It’s going to pay for itself. You’re confused? Just keep following the steps. We’ve got circles and arrows for you. Watch Britt Migs explain “how those credit card point people sound.” One commenter explains, “This doesn’t work if you already had a SwizzyPay account.” Someone else offers a real service to help people book lie flat seats, prompting Britt to reply, “omg i’ve summoned one of.” That’s us. Someone says the process sounds exhausting and our instinct is to explain one more exception, certain that this will clear everything up. I Plead Guilty The closest real example might be my strategy for the 2011 US Airways Grand Slam promotion. You earned a big bonus by completing transactions with different partners. Getting to 36 qualifying activities earned 100,000 bonus miles. Here’s what I actually did: Transferred points from five different hotel programs. Converted four American Airlines miles into one US Airways mile. Spent 500 miles on a magazine subscription I didn’t want. Installed the airline’s browser toolbar, performed three searches to earn one mile, and then disabled the toolbar. There was another Netflix subscription even though my wife already had one, purchases from three florists, and Biscoff cookies. I tracked the activity in a spreadsheet and wanted backup transactions in case something didn’t post. This isn’t even something from a less mature period of my life. Less than two weeks ago, I explained how I redirected my wife’s Bilt authorized-user rewards after using up my five points accelerators. Her points go to her account. Her separate Bilt Cash goes to her account, too. That lets her use her own accelerators and separate transfer bonus allowance. Then each to have a primary card and an authorized-user card on the other’s account to take advantage of double transfer bonuses. The Real Deals Sound Made Up, Too The old deals had names like BigCrumbs, OneVanilla, and Bluebird. SwizzyPay (formerly Buck Buck) fits right in. Did you know that GooglePay used to be known as ISIS until the Islamic State ruined that brand? BigCrumbs, OneVanilla, and Bluebird. In 2014, I explained a chain involving buying American Express gift cards through a cash back portal, using those to buy OneVanilla Visa cards at CVS, loading the Visa balances onto Bluebird at Walmart, and moving the money back to a bank account. You needed stores that would cooperate. The cash back helped cover the fees. Walmart was too far away for the economics to work for me but I had alternatives! Christmas morning, buying six figures in stickers. In 2009, combining a US Airways shopping bonus with Track-It-Back’s earning rate produced 140 miles per dollar. But first you needed purchases from 5 total merchants to qualify (but not more than 10!). I arranged over $100,000 in sticker purchases across accounts belonging to friends and colleagues, generating over 16 million miles. This involved little purchases like $2 tree donations and $5 gift cards before the big orders. The product helped recover lost belongings. A charitable donation reduced the tax basis. I had no other use for the product. Handwrite 94 cards and send them to Kalamazoo. IHG’s 2015 promotion offered at least 500 points per mailed sweepstakes entry. Ninety-four separate entries meant at least 47,000 points. A reader offered to do all the handwriting and mailing for $136. I used the service. We had created an industry to spare people the manual labor of telling a hotel company their address 94 times. Buy money, deposit money, use the money to pay for the money. The U.S. Mint sold dollar coins at face value, accepted credit cards, and shipped them free. People earned rewards, deposited the coins, and paid their card bills. The federal government wanted coins circulating. We wanted miles. The boxes were heavy. Become important to a casino because another casino thinks you’re important. Nick Reyes documented the Wyndham-to-Caesars-to-Hard-Rock-to-Ocean chain: start with hotel status from a credit card, match it through casino programs, make the required visits to Atlantic City, and end up with an MSC cruise offer. There were still costs, including gratuities. The card-based Wyndham entry route ended in 2025. But for a time, explaining how your credit card bought you a cruise required a detour through New Jersey. MilesTalk literally trademarked ‘status match merry-go-round’. Fly around the world so you can afford to fly around the world. The 2024 SAS challenge offered a million points for flying 15 different eligible airlines. My advice included looking for short Virgin Atlantic flights in the Caribbean and KLM flights within Asia to check off carriers more efficiently. A normal person might have stopped at “15 different airlines.” Then there’s David Phillips buying 12,150 pudding cups and arranging for food banks to help remove the barcodes. Britt’s 100 bags of dog food barely qualify as a starter purchase. As for me, I’ve gone dumpster diving for Wendy’s soda cups and attended a hair loss consultation with a full head of hair. The cups earned AirTran flights. The consultation earned Delta miles. Credit: runner1928 via Wikimedia Commons What Kind Of Person Finds This Fun? The points obsessive enjoys systems, notices exceptions, and hates leaving value on the table. There’s real satisfaction in understanding something complicated and making it work. The business class seat is valuable. Knowing how you got it is part of the thrill. So is explaining it afterward. Incessantly. To anyone who will (barely) listen. The hobby even calls a spouse “Player Two.” A person you promised to love for the rest of your life has become a tool for scaling. One commenter on Britt’s video wrote: We used to know what plants were edible. So glad my brain is focused on knowing credit card point schemes instead. Modernity is awesome The appeal is that reading the rules can actually change the outcome. Most customers accept the price. We want to find the exception, prove it works, and tell someone about it. It’s also a remarkable use of human effort. Shipping coins around the country and handwriting the same information 94 times can be profitable. And the person congratulating himself on outsmarting marketing may spend more time thinking about a bank’s products than the bank’s own employees. The financial mistake is counting every benefit at full retail while forgetting the costs. A $12,000 business class ticket doesn’t mean you saved $12,000 if you’d never have bought it. Annual fees, purchases you wouldn’t otherwise make, forgone cash back, and an inconvenient itinerary are costs. But the opposite mistake is pretending every spare hour could have been sold at your professional billing rate. Some people enjoy crossword puzzles or football. Some enjoy figuring out which airline program will book another airline’s seat for fewer points. The rewards can be extraordinary. In 2002, I wrote about buying 21 magazine subscriptions for $1,258.95, earning Starwood points, transferring those to Qantas with bonuses and a favorable conversion ratio, and getting enough miles for a roundtrip on British Airways Concorde. So I laughed at Britt’s video. I also noticed she never tells us which program the 100,000 points are in. Before I buy the dog food, I’m going to need to see the award chart.