Wasn't there someone in China who would regularly buy first-class plane tickets, go to the airport and eat in the airline lounge, and then cancel the ticket before boarding?
This is impressive. This should also not be necessary to discharge a student loan debt obligation. While I respect this dude's discipline, I worry the takeaway might be "millennials should spend more than half a decade saying no to all happiness to have a chance at an economically viable life" -- as opposed to "you should have a debt payoff plan and also advocate for structural changes that make colossal student debt unlikely if not impossible"
Edit: I had a totally different response before, but this felt more important to say:
I don't get the outrage over this. Like 'this' is indicative of a horrible society somehow. That someone finding an awesome loophole in a business model using it to their advantage, helping them make a financial investment in themselves, is somehow a horrible thing.
I mean, it’s not strictly necessary. Some people are just into hyper optimization or being extremely frugal, it’s like a hobby. For example I’ve heard a lot of the old (almost all Chinese) ladies who pick up depositable recyclables in the Bay Area are pretty wealthy or solidly middle class. They just do it because it gives them something to do and is cash flow positive.
There are also people making >$200k/yr who live in cars and get all their food/showers at their tech employer. Sure you could write an article about them regarding how they’re doing it to save up enough for a down payment. But it’s really just a way to save slightly more money; they could live in a studio and buy their own food, it would just maybe reduce their saving rate by $3k/mo
I feel like this is hard to explain, but to demonstrate that some people (also me, but I’m not that hardcore) are just into this, there are tons of video games where a main part of the gameplay is “min maxing” like this. For example people will spend dozens of hours figuring out how to increase xp or money per hour, then hundreds of hours grinding out their new method, just for fun. The people like the guy from the article doing this are just doing the real-life version of min maxing.
I thought the same. Made me click! I’m not sure if I would have if the headline revealed it was 150/yr. I’d have connected the dots, found it reasonable and the immediate demystification would cause loss of interest for me, and loss of revenue for NY Post.
In the end, I paid them for my dopamine hit. A fair, capitalistic exchange I’d say.
I'm not sure a lot of people are willing to sacrifice "eating healthy" for "saving a few bucks on carnival food" particularly when there's only a single location that will serve you.
The article presents this as if this is some move of financial genius, when all I see him doing is trading health care costs tomorrow for a tiny bit of extra cash today.
As someone in a similar situation (a lot of debt, eat shit food so eating at Six Flags would probably be better) - it would cost me over $20 a day to get to the closest amusement park, and that isn't even a six flags. Most parks are far away from population centres.
I recall a talk by Jeff Bezos regarding starting the 'Prime' business model. He said something like: 'What do you do about people who abuse the all you can eat option?'.
My take is that there will always be a few outliers who take advantage of the 'all you can eat' model. But I imagine most of the time they are just outliers and those people don't affect a business' bottom line that much.
If anything such a model is ethical if it means people can save money. I mean, the business still gets to make money, just a little differently than other businesses.
Maybe they raised their prices, but I haven't seen much room for abusing the Prime model. The shipping cost is obviously baked into the price of the item in most cases.
Exactly the same as with buffet restaurants. It takes quite the stomach for the restaurant to lose money on someone, so it's not a big deal if a few people manage to do it.
Reminds me of Olive Garden's original Pasta Pass (albeit on a smaller scale). The first year they offered it it was around $150 for about 3 months of 2 meals a day. As 22 year old who couldn't cook and had recently graduated from college, I took full advantage. Each meal came with a salad, bread sticks, a pasta dish, and a drink. I would place the order to-go and pick them up on the way home from work and have food for the next 24 hours. Actually even more, I found it was so much food that I started giving it away to my coworkers friends, even offering it to the homeless guy who busked near my apartment. Probably easily 4-5K calories a day. It wasn't the best pasta in the world but it was better than the ramen I would make at home. And not the most unhealthy thing as long as I didn't eat the full portions that were served.
The next year apparently they made it in-store only, probably because everyone who signed up was doing exactly what I did and they were losing their hat. I'm guessing the OP doesn't have this problem because driving by Six Flags every day isn't really practical for most people. And hey they got some free publicity out of letting this guy abuse the system!
The article makes it sound like this practice has continued in some form to the present, even if reduced. But theme parks in CA were closed for quite a while during the lockdown, right? I'd be curious to hear what a lifestyle transition looks like going from all six flags food to "omg the stores are out of pasta" and cheap home cooking.
Many people do this with the Costco Food Court, just saying, there is something pretty powerful about providing food as your loss leader to consistently get traffic
31 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 79.9 ms ] threadI don't get the outrage over this. Like 'this' is indicative of a horrible society somehow. That someone finding an awesome loophole in a business model using it to their advantage, helping them make a financial investment in themselves, is somehow a horrible thing.
There are also people making >$200k/yr who live in cars and get all their food/showers at their tech employer. Sure you could write an article about them regarding how they’re doing it to save up enough for a down payment. But it’s really just a way to save slightly more money; they could live in a studio and buy their own food, it would just maybe reduce their saving rate by $3k/mo
I feel like this is hard to explain, but to demonstrate that some people (also me, but I’m not that hardcore) are just into this, there are tons of video games where a main part of the gameplay is “min maxing” like this. For example people will spend dozens of hours figuring out how to increase xp or money per hour, then hundreds of hours grinding out their new method, just for fun. The people like the guy from the article doing this are just doing the real-life version of min maxing.
In the end, I paid them for my dopamine hit. A fair, capitalistic exchange I’d say.
The article presents this as if this is some move of financial genius, when all I see him doing is trading health care costs tomorrow for a tiny bit of extra cash today.
My take is that there will always be a few outliers who take advantage of the 'all you can eat' model. But I imagine most of the time they are just outliers and those people don't affect a business' bottom line that much.
If anything such a model is ethical if it means people can save money. I mean, the business still gets to make money, just a little differently than other businesses.
The next year apparently they made it in-store only, probably because everyone who signed up was doing exactly what I did and they were losing their hat. I'm guessing the OP doesn't have this problem because driving by Six Flags every day isn't really practical for most people. And hey they got some free publicity out of letting this guy abuse the system!
Not everything there is burgers and hot dogs.