The Edge of I-Hacked

from zerosign.net

This is one of the coolest promotions to come out in a long time. Currently, Wendy’s has a promtion worked out with AirTran Airways in the form of travel coupons and, if you take advantage of the program in the right way, this can be very profitable for you. For their current promotion, they are placing coupons for 1/4 credit for an A Rewards Credit voucher on their 20oz and 32oz cups betweeen 11/1/05 and 12/31/05. For 8 A Rewards Credits you get a free one-way coach ticket.

Here’s the math. Say one 20oz beverage is $1.29 (I’m sure this won’t work with water purchases but it couldn’t hurt to try)

64 drinks * $1.29 per drink = $82.56

Now, if you want to take this to the extreme (and I encourage that) you can try other methods, including but not limited too:

- dumpster diving
- stealing other’s cups from their table
- bribing a Wendy’s employee for the coupon cups out the backdoor
each of these methods would decrease the $82.56 investment and theirby increase your profit. This game is wide open and ready to be taken advantage off!

Wow.. That is a good deal!

If you are like most people you have somehow found yourself to be in possession of literally millions of pennies, nickels and dimes — they are probably littered about in containers around your house. You would like to convert them to some real money right? I am sure by now you have heard of the RIDICULOUS service “Coinstar“. This company has kiosks in supermarkets and other venues that allow you to dump your loose change into their machine, which then sorts and counts your money and gives you a nice little receipt showing you exactly how much you dumped in. You can then take this receipt to the counter to get your money. Sounds nice right? Well unfortunately Coinstar is not a “Not for Profit” business, so they take a 9% cut of your money. Seriously? 9% for you to count my change? So if you were to dump about $11 in change, you would get back $10.01. I don’t think it was worth a dollar to have them do that.

There are ways around this, however. The first (and best) is your usually at your bank. A lot of banks have their own counting machines, and will count/sort and convert it to dollar bills for free. (Most of the time they don’t even ask if you are a member) However there is a growing trend that banks want you to roll your change in order to change to dollar bills. If this is the case with your bank, just try another, to see if they have a counting machine. Many people have commented that most Commerce Bank have coin machines.

Then of course is the ‘ol 1¢ trick. I believe this was posted in 2600, sorry I don’t remember who wrote it. The way this trick works is you put in 1¢ (0.01) and cash out. The machine gives you a receipt for 1¢ (0.01) because there is no way to take 9% from a penny. This is all fine and good, but it will take quite a bit of time — Not to mention you can only use pennies and you have to hand the cashier 40 billion receipts. But it is an interesting hack, so I mentioned it here.

And then is the post office. In most post offices, located in the lobby is an automated stamp vending machine. The interesting thing about this vending machine, is it gives you your change in Dollar and Fifty-Cent coins! So if you have some change you would like to ..um.. “change” go to the post office at around Midnight (or when the PO is really dead) and find the stamp machine. Pumped in all of your pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. I selected to buy one 39 cent stamp and hit the coin return.

Apparently I put in over $8 because I got back seven of the dollar coins (those are GREAT on toll roads!!!,) one fifty cent piece and a quarter.

Ok, so I still have coins, but they are of larger denominations, and I can now take them to the bank.

Post Office idea obtained from jonnyGURU of ATOT Forums:

From GottaDeal.com

BlackFriday is quickly approaching (The day after Thanksgiving) and is THE busiest retail shopping day of the year. A LOT of retailers have incredible specials on this day, and if you want to be better prepared on what stores will be offering, you should check this site out.

Using “Informants” they catalog the Sale Ads that these retailers will be releasing (as in they are not released yet!)

Make sure to let them know that I-Hacked sent ya! (I don’t get anything from them, just want to let them know that I am supporting them)

from CNET News.com

According to News.com, Esquire writer AJ Jacobs put a badly written and error ridden article on Wikipedia and let the Wikipedian community have at it. Within days, the article had received hundreds of edits, was cleaned up, proof read and fact checked. If it worked for Jacobs, shouldn’t it work for you?

First off, I don’t condone ANYONE buying ANYTHING at Best Buy. But if you are going to, you might as well get the best deal possible right? So how are you going to do that? Do exactly as below and it WILL work.

The managers are graded above all things in two areas which they will always focus on; extended warranty and accessory sales.
In the case of home theater (HDTV, etc) accessories that are by far the highest focus are Monster products. For those who are scratching their heads, Monster products are primarily expensive (overpriced) cables and (useless) noise filtering surge protectors. A customer purchasing these products and an extended warranty will get a a managers attention very quickly.

Here is the general idea of how to utilize this knowledge to steal a deal — if you want the 42A10 then let them sell you on a high-end surge protector ($200-400), a couple hundred dollars in cables and a service plan. DO NOT deviate on the items to package with the TV that I just listed; these are vital to getting them to deal as they are very high margin. Once you say you want to buy all this stuff ask for a ‘package discount’. Push them as low as you can for the [ackage deal - they WILL NOT want to walk this sale as it makes them look like a hero.
Once you have gotten them as low as you can on the total price the magic will happen - they will write up the sale leaving prices full retail on the accessories and warranty and take the reduction on the TV, even possibly dropping below cost on this. The reason is they are graded by percentage of sales of this stuff based on dollars - they will drop the cost of only the TV.
Can you guess the rest? Buy it all and wait a few days, then return to the store and refund everything but the TV. DO NOT let them tell you to call an 800 # to refund the warranty - they may try that one but policy is to return it in-store for the first 30 days. They will put up a fight on this and may threaten to increase the cost of the TV but hold your ground. If their corporate got wind of them working deals to raise accessory and warranty numbers they would be fired. If you must, threaten a phone call - they will run scared. If you want it even smoother do the return at another location.

This strategy can be utilzed in most of their departments - if you need to know the key accessories for appliances, computers, car audio, etc let me know.
I wont wish you luck, it will simply work. If you have any problems though just drop me a line and I’ll help all I can…