“Faced with the task of spending a mandatory $2500 at his school’s cafeteria, a University of Southern California student got creative and spent his entire allowance on iTunes-eligible bottles of Pepsi. Employing the ’tilt’ method in order to ensure he was only taking home winners, and then taking them home in a suitcase, the student proceeded to dump most of the bottles down the trash chute, correctly stating that “Nothing in the terms and conditions said you had to drink this crap.” The photograph of him taking a break to enjoy a Diet Coke, after dumping 2,500 Pepsis down the trash chute? Classic,” MacMischief.com reports.
There are similiar elements to the MacDailyNews article our own SteveJack posted back in early February (see Related MacDailyNews article below). The student has posted photos of his endeavor along with introductory text:
As a USC freshman, I am forced to have a meal plan. This plan gives me $2500 “dining dollars” to spend over the semester. Given that it is incredibly difficult to purchase $2500 worth of food in such a short time, I realized I could turn this “money” into free songs on iTunes by purchasing Pepsi.
See the photos here.
Related MacDailyNews article:
A Coke drinker’s forced migration to Pepsi in quest of free Apple iTunes – February 04, 2004
awesome. wish he spread the wealth to get more ppl using itunes.
Not really any “wealth” for him to spread–he still lost a penny per cap.
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By the way, how have people been doing? I’m currently at 13 wins out of 28 about (46%) but this has been a bad week–not one winner.
I am 1 for 1.
It’s kind of funny – people commenting on his site chastise him for not recycling the bottles. I tend to agree.
Hmmm? I wonder if he was able to submit 2,500 winning Pepsi caps under a single iTMS account. According to the official rules, rule #6 states that only 200 winning caps can be redeemed per email address/person.
Whether he was using Windows 2000, XP or whatever “other” flavor they crap out or OS X, did he set up at least 13 separate user accounts on his computer and set up each user account with a different iTMS account and then have 200 songs redeemed for each account ?
Seems like a lot of work. But hey, well worth it?
Total number of redeemed promotion caps = 53 since 3/19/2004 in Queens, NY area.
Hollah!
I’m 2 for 3 on Big Gulp cups… all my bottles are winners for the obvious reason. But I’ve gotten very few total. Anyway.
I’m 3 out of 4 but then I quit because I realized I really hate Pepsi and it’s cheaper to just buy music.
You can only redeem 10 per day. He also has 13 days to get it done. April 30th is the cutoff date.
Good luck dude! Think your screwed!!!
hahaha, dumb ass Coke drinker.
One dollar for a 20 oz Pepsi? Sheesh, my school charges at least 1.25..
Lookie he got aout 150 songs for $2500, what a burn. ran out of pepsi first.
loser
I’m 55 out 57. Two loses at soda machines.
Don’t they have nickle deposits on those bottles?
Don’t like Pepsi, and since I don’t actively seek it out, there’s not that much incentive for me to spend a buck on something I won’t enjoy to begin with to MAYBE get something I’ll know I’ll enjoy for the long haul and get WITHOUT paying the “idiot premium”, especially if up to this point you disliked Pepsi and are only now drinking it because of this promotion. What’s the “Idiot Premium”? Well, when you go to the store, that lovely soft drink doesn’t just cost 99 cents does it? You gotta spend $1.17 (or MORE, as one noted above) on a Pepsi (government has to get their tax, right? Yeppers) and then you have to get home, or wherever you’re going (if you’re driving it’s gonna cost you in gas there and back – gas = money – especially recently) just to get some “free” music. By the time you get home, or wherever, I’ve got several songs purchased, downloaded, sorted and uploaded to my iPod and I haven’t had to waste the gas, or spend the time or the effort to opening the silly bottle of sugarwater to get at what I wanted in the first place, and I ONLY paid 99 cents for each song. It’s a pointless and more costly exercise in that respect, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but there, I said it anyway.
Now, if someone were to GIVE me a bottle, would I refuse it? Are you nuts? NO! It would be truly FREE. I’d take the cap (if it turns out to be a winner) and give the bottle to whomever gave it to me in the first place, let them figure out what to do with the open bottle, and go get my FREE music.
Of course, if you DO enjoy Pepsi, that’s a different matter. I’m a little envious, because you get to enjoy a refreshing soda AND get a little bonus. It’s still costing you more than if you’d just downloaded that song straight off of iTMS, and that’s my only satisfying source to crush the beast of envy within.
And you think feelings and opinions about the Mac vs. PC get heated? Hah. I’ll drink any Diet Coke or an IBC Root Beer or even a Fresca, and then look for all sorts of other carbonated beverages before ever consider drinking a Pepsi. I’d look for a water fountain first. Put a Pepsi drinker and a Coke drinker in the same room and tell them they can only have one or the other made available. Now THAT’S a scary thought.
Oops. 14 for 29.
Actually, I used to be a Coke drinker. But as I told people, “I don’t drink Coke for the taste–I drink Coke for the caffein.” I don’t like coffee. I drank Coke because that was what was available. When I did drink Pepsi, it seemed really sweet.
Later in life, I switched to Mountain Dew. Tastes sweeter than Coke and it has Orange Juice (“So it’s good for you!”). My roomate likes Pepsi, so I started drinking it. After awhile, I “switched”–Coke now tastes sort of bland.
That said, I drink Coke when I’m in restaurants which serve it. I don’t care all that much. With this promotion, I’ve been buying a Pepsi a day (or two, depending on my day) in place of one of my Mountain Dews.
Big Gulp cup
You realize you can roll up the Big Gulp cups to reveal WINNER or PLAY AGAIN without destroying the cup right? Just another option, which is a little easier than the bottle/tilt method which I find the bottle fogging up most of the time.
In the UK we have to settle for ‘flat’ Coke music promos! I’m a Pepsi fan…
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http://homepage.mac.com/johnhood
Just wish for his own sake he had celebrated with a drink that doesn’t contain Aspertame. That stuff looks really nasty.
But the guy is a totally idiot to waste that money…
$2500 over semester. A semester is about 3 months long, which equals 90 plus days. 3 meals per day = 270 meals.
$2500 divided by 270 equals $9.26 per meal.
And the idiot says: “Given that it is incredibly difficult to purchase $2500 worth of food in such a short time…”
Yeah, sure.
Somebody please cut off his allowance and donate the money to a charity to buy food for people that can use it.
Another spolied, rich kid that does not know the value of money.
Washington, DC…I have yet to see a yellow cap. Grrrr…
So since USC boy posted the the pix of his “winning caps” with their CLEARLY VISIBLE NUMBERS has anyone tried to redeem his caps?
That would serve spoiled rich kid right if we all f—ed him over.
Hey Prudence:
I think you misunderstood the circumstances surrounding the $2,500 spent on Pepsi. The student doesn’t have a choice. The school “requires” that he participate in their food program, so the charge is mandatory for all students, lets say who live on campus.
So instead of eating 3 square meals a day, if you can call campus food nutritionally balanced, he eats what food he feels like, and spends the rest on Pepsi for himself and hopefully some friends.
I still don’t get how he is redeeming 2,500 winning caps, when for each iTMS account, you can only redeem 10 winning caps a day for a total of 200 user maximum.
Yeah I did a bit of image enhancement and tried to redeem them, but he’s already got his songs. Oh well, I tried at least
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To Tommy Boy,
Once a winning cap has been redeemed, it can no longer be redeemed a second time. Think of it as each winning code have a check mark assigned to it once it has ben redeemed (entered into the system) by a user.
So no, you can’t redeem a winning cap more than once.
That would be a major burn though.
Uh, guys, you need to read past the article (which, I think, is wrong): the guy’s just spending a few extra bucks on these bottles (looks like 60-70 bottles fit in his suitcase). He’s not spending all $2500 on that, just what he’s got left over from the semester.
I remember from my college days that people would buy crates of sodas and peanuts or whatever at the end of each semester–otherwise the money they (their parents) had put into the cafeteria sysetm would just be lost. This is just a modern day twist on the matter (though of course buying food and donating to a shelter or something would have been much more socially responsible!).
I am hoping when iTMS comes to Canada they will have a similar bottle cap promo. I hope it is with Molson or Moosehead. I could force myself to drink $2500.00 worth of beer over a semester. I would even go back to university to do it.
Since Pepsi droped the bottle, oops sorry, ball, and only shipped caps on Diet Pepsi crap, I understand partially what he has done. Diet anything soda is just plain turd. The soda deserved to be tossed.
And then he is seen enjoying another diet soda, sorry, no creditibility. You suck as much as a vacuum and anything from MS.
His parents must be very proud of him. Instead of purchasing his meals, such as breakfast/lunch/dinner for the semester he bought sodas, and then didn’t drink them. So he just threw out $2500 of his parents hard earned money. That probably went over well at home.