Winning a lifetime supply of anything, be it chocolate, batteries, or pudding, seems like it could be either a dream or a nightmare. But then most of us haven’t actually won lifetime supplies of anything — all this time, we’ve been left to our own imaginations regarding the experience.
Now, thanks to Reddit‘s vast network of users, we can all enlighten ourselves. OSBTAdmin recently asked the question, “Redditors who’ve won a ‘Lifetime’ supply contest: How did you win? and How is it going?” The answer: mostly positive though sometimes nightmarish, according to many of the 18,000+ comments that have flooded in over the past two days.
In_Plain_English shared a delightfully heartwarming story about the benefits that came from a lifetime supply of Readers Digest:
This was in the ’90s; my Granddad won a lifetime supply of Readers Digest. He was the only doctor in a small village in India (population < 1000). He started stacking them up in his clinic, and the village kids would randomly browse through them. As long as there wasn’t a rush or they weren’t being loud, my Granddad would let them sit there for as long as they wanted…
And so it happened that every summer I’d come to the village to find my rural friends speak better English than anyone else in the village — and in some cases better than my English-school educated city friends — and sharing jokes from the “Life’s like that” and “Laughter is the best medicine” sections.
Nelsonmaverick shared the story of a friend’s overabundance of aluminum foil:
I went to school with a kid who’s mom won a lifetime supply of aluminum foil. They wrap EVERYTHING in foil. His whole lunch every day was wrapped in foil: sandwich, fruit, etc…and then they make one of those baking pouches, and that’s his lunch bag. When we had like desert potluck his cookies came wrapped in in foil. I asked him about it once and he said they even wrap all their Christmas presents in it, and they still get too many boxes of it. They give it away to friends and family.
Dmala’s tale of a lifetime supply of cat food sounds like a legit good prize:
My wife won a “lifetime supply” of pet food for our cat. They didn’t even bother sending product, they just tacked another few thousand dollars onto the $10k cash prize. That was a nice little windfall. The only weird thing was that it was paid as a stack of maxed out Visa gift cards. You can’t really pay things like mortgages and credit card bills with what amounts to a credit card, so we ended up using the gift cards for things like groceries. It’s pretty amazing how far your paycheck goes when your bill for food and incidentals is effectively zero.
While xEvilTac0x’s Pizza Hut story is similarly rewarding, if not somewhat depressing… does a person really spend $37,000 on pizza in their adulthood?
a friend of mine won a lifetime supply of pizza from Pizza Hut. they calculated his age, the average pizzas a person consumes per year, did some mathemagical calculation and fed ex’d him a check for $37,000. In my book he won.
Billrogerson gave a great example of why it pays to follow instructions:
Didn’t win but received a lifetime pass for a music festival…Received it by attending the festival announcement party. Everyone got an envelope upon entry which clearly had passes in them but said not to open. At the end of the night, if you still had a sealed envelope, they gave you a ‘lifetime’ pass. I think about 20 out of 200 ppl maybe?
Of course, not everyone’s experience was positive. Wgibbsw was a bit jaded by the actual meaning of “year’s supply”:
Once won a year’s supply of the Tropicana juice drink. Was awesome but you could only buy four cartons a month with dated vouchers so it never really felt as magical as I was hoping. 9 year old me wanted like a dedicated tropicana faucet in the kitchen.
Ajamke shared what the exact definition of “free pizza and beer for a year” is, and it’s a surprisingly moderate amount:
My friend and I were in a competition at an arena football game to win “Free pizza and beer for a year”. The first person to kick a field goal from like 15-20 yards would win. Apparently their definition of a year’s worth of pizza and beer is 12, 24-packs of beer and a large Rocky Rococos pizza per month for 12 months. We had to pick up all 12 cases of the beer from a distributor at one time so we had a party.
Lord_Of_the_Strings was essentially ripped off by the company promising a lifetime supply of knives:
Won a lifetime supply of knives. I guessed correctly how many sheets of paper the knife could stab through. After I broke the first two, I was told my third was my last one. Apparently the knives were supposed to last a lifetime.
While tipsyskipper shared a similar story about Oakley, which seems to prove that “lifetime supply” actually equals “three” in the eyes of manufacturers:
At one point…Oakley had a lifetime warranty on their lenses. My brother busted a pair right through the lens. I begged him for two years to let me have the broken pair. Finally he caved and gave them to me. I sent them to Oakley and a few weeks later had a nice new pair of sunglasses (and a brother who wasn’t too happy, he didn’t think they’d honor the warranty). I then busted right through the lens in the same spot. I sent that pair in and a few weeks later had a nice new pair of sunglasses…and a letter that said, “Thanks for being a valued Oakley customer. This is your last pair.”
Truly the funniest story of the bunch, though, comes from Explain_To_The_Geeks, whose family quickly discovered that a lifetime supply of apples was actually a giant curse on the entire neighborhood:
When I was little, I won a lifetime supply of apples by correctly guessing how many were in a barrel. There were 110 and I guessed 109. The prize was 110 apples at a time each month. It was insane. After the first delivery, my parents begged them to stop. It’s impossible for a family of three to go through 110 apples before they rot and our neighbors stopped answering the door when they saw my parents standing there with bags of apples.
…It quickly became, “Goddamn it. Here comes Sandra and this time she has apple pie, apple crisp, frozen apples, apple cores, dried apples, apple chips, those creepy old people dolls with rotten apple faces, apples specifically to put into a pig’s mouth, apple cider, apple juice, apple seeds, apple stems, an apple tree, apple butter, candy apples, bacon wrapped apples, apple sandwiches, apple polenta, apple pancakes, and several empty apple barrels.”
Of course, we’ve only shared a tiny selection of all the prize winners on Reddit. There’s the guy who won a lifetime supply of Sonic, the grandpa who won a year’s worth of tampons through empowering Facebook messages, and the mother who told Kellogg’s that her son didn’t want a lifetime supply of cereal, among many, many others (a lifetime’s supply, hm?). At the least, the thread can serve as a morale-booster the next time you get depressed about losing yet another contest. Because maybe it wasn’t worth it in the end.
(Via Brobible)
