You may recall from waaaaay back in the early days of Punny Money that my wife once held a part-time job at a Krispy Kreme, maker of some of the finest donuts in the world. What you probably don’t know is that she only kept the job for two months, in between college semesters. During those two months, I ate about 500 Krispy Kreme donuts of assorted varieties… and I lost 20 pounds doing it. Here’s how it happened.

One of the great benefits of working at Krispy Kreme is that, every day you go in to work, you’re allowed to bring home a dozen free donuts. (Correction from my wife: that’s the only great benefit of working for Krispy Kreme, unless you consider smelling like donuts constantly no matter how much you clean yourself a benefit.) It only took a few days of the smell of glaze and toppings to turn my wife off the donuts forever, but she still happily brought home a dozen for me each day she worked.

At first, my wife only worked a couple of days a week at Krispy Kreme. But as her manager realized her superior skills over the other workers—i.e. speaking more than two words of English, and not constantly trying to rob the cash register—she was asked to work nearly full time. That means she could bring home a dozen donuts five days a week for free. I could have just asked her not to bring home the donuts, but I pretty much never refuse free food. So she brought home around 60 donuts a week… and I ate them all.

It wasn’t just the regular glazed donuts, either. While the policy varies from one Krispy Kreme location to the next, my wife was allowed to take home any of the more expensive donuts with toppings and frosting and other yummy things. My favorites were any of the donuts with sprinkles, especially the orange and black Halloween ones (which were still served well into December there). According to the Krispy Kreme nutritional information (PDF), each sprinkled donut comes with about 270 calories, 12 grams of fat, and some other numbers that would give any decent dietitian a heart attack just reading them. And yes, I ate 12 of those five days a week.

So how in the name of chocolate glazed crullers did I lose 20 pounds eating 60 donuts a week? Well, it’s really quite simple:

• I have an active metabolism. I generally eat around 3,000 calories a day anyway, and I’m a relatively healthy weight for a person my age and height. I’ve had several doctors look at me and say I’m perfectly healthy, so I guess it’s sort of like having a superpower (though I’d gladly trade it in for x-ray vision).
• If you eat 12 Krispy Kreme donuts, you don’t feel like eating anything else for at least 24 hours. Here’s the key to the Krispy Kreme Diet that can make it work for anyone. If you’ve ever had more than a couple of them at the same time, you’d know that multiple Krispy Kreme donuts can really fill your tummy… and then some. After eating my dozen a day, I didn’t want to look at food again… until the next batch of donuts came home.

In the end, it’s probably for the best that my wife left Krispy Kreme after only a couple of months. I’m not sure how much longer I would have lasted without vegetables, protein, and arteries full of blood instead of glaze. I will admit that I do sometimes still long for my daily dozen, and my wife has caught me once or twice sneaking a sniff of her old work uniform that still has a hint of that donutty aroma on it.

Oh, and I should probably mention that I’m not a licensed anything, and if you try to duplicate this diet on your own, you will probably die before you get to the third day. Then again, if any of you emo cut-yourself-all-day MySpace losers out there wants to end it all with some style and flair, I could think of worse ways to go that drowning your vital organs in a bucket of warm, delicious Krispy Kreminess.

I’m just saying…

You people probably think I’ve really lost it this time. But it’s true! Baskin Robbins is giving away free ice cream to expectant women on May 21, 2008. Between 11am and 10pm, customers in select cities can pop by their BR for a free three-ounce soft serve cup or cone—but only if you’re preggers!

Now if you’re like me, you like free things. And if you’re like my wife, you like ice cream. So when Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s both had free or cheap ice cream events a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t hesitate to stand in line with a bunch of other cheap bastards to get some of that frozen milk stuff. This time, however, it’ll be much harder to claim our prize. That’s because my wife is not pregnant.

I don’t know about you, but I think this promotion is a little too sexist. For one, it excludes a really swell bunch of folks known as men. Plus it rewards rampant baby-making and overpopulation. Worst of all, it excludes the portion of the population most deserving of ice cream: adorable little girls. I can imagine poor seven-year-old Katie crying to her mom that Baskin Robbins wouldn’t give her free ice cream unless she had sex with a man and got knocked up. Also, unless they can finally figure out how to make their own sperm, lesbians are SOL on this deal too.

Notice that I said it will be much harder to claim our prize, not impossible. No no, I’m not going to impregnate my wife just to get her some free ice cream. (Try explaining that one to your future child. “You weren’t an accident, sweetie. You were a coupon!”) Because this promotion is so dastardly and devious, I feel it is my civic duty to find a way to take advantage of it! And if you’re like me and your wife won’t let you near her until this promotion is over is not with child, here are some tricks you can use to fool the folks behind the Baskin Robbins counter into thinking you’ve got a bun in your oven. (Note: All of these tips work best if you’re a woman.)

• Bump it up. BR is calling it “Bump Day” for a reason: you’ll need one on your belly to cash in on this deal. If you’re already fat in the right places, you should be able to pull this step off easily. If not, there are a variety of bump simulation devices (BSDs) available on the market today. Rolled-up t-shirts, zip-lock bags full of pudding, and hot water bottles are just a few items you can use to pull off the necessary look.
• Act pregnant. When you walk into Baskin Robbins, you should do all of the things a woman normally does when she is toting around a baby in her uterus. For instance, if you bring the baby’s “father” along, you can cuss him out for “making you that way.” Or you can ask the person behind the ice cream counter if you can get that order with a side of pickles and hot dogs.
• Get your glow on. You know how pregnant women have a sort of “glow” about them? Yeah, you can fake the glow pretty easily with various lotions and other things you probably have in your make-up box right now.
• Provide photographic evidence. A picture from “your recent ultrasound” (oh hey, what a coincidence: a Google image search for “ultrasound”) should be enough to prove that you’re with child, even if it doesn’t show yet.
• Bring a pregnancy test. If you’re not pregnant, it’s going to be very difficult to pass one of those over-the-counter do-it-yourself pee-on-a-stick tests, even if it’s for free ice cream. So get one of your pregnant gal pals to help you cheat by taking the test herself. Then bring the pre-completed test to your nearest Baskin Robbins, wave it around in the cashier’s face (it’ll be more convincing if it’s really dripping wet), and claim your prize.
• Break water. Step 1: Strap a plastic bag full of water to your upper thigh under a dress. Step 2: Go to Baskin Robbins. Step 3: Puncture the bag. Step 4: Scream, “My water just broke! Give me my ice cream so I can go to the hospital!” They’ll probably give you one of those 10-gallon buckets just to get you out the door.
• Just lie. If you’re not interested in any of the above ideas, you could just lie and say you’re pregnant. After all, pregnancy doesn’t really show until a few months in anyway. Of course, if they start equipping Baskin Robbins with ultrasounds, you might be in trouble.
• Free ice cream for sluts, too. Even if you don’t look or act pregnant, you might still be able to get your free ice cream simply by asking for it, especially if you dress like a whore. If the employees ask if you’re pregnant, simply wink and reply, “Why, are you offering?”

Fair warning: if you try to con your way into some free ice cream with a phony bump and you end up getting pregnant shortly after, you totally had it coming. That said, you might want to avoid Baskin Robbins’ experimental new flavor that it’s offering only during this event: Vanilla Sperm Explosion.

Call it what you want—a recession, an “economic correction,” a figment of your imagination—the economy is hurting. And nowhere is that more apparent than in my belly. Just to make ends meet, I’ve had to cut down my daily caloric intake from 7,000 calories to a mere 6,750. This has had a devastating effect on the local restaurant industry: eateries in my neighborhood are closing down at a rate of one roughly every 37 seconds! (No! Not the Dunkin Donuts! Take the Taco Bell instead!)

Okay, so maybe the situation isn’t that bad, but one only needs to walk into a local casual dining establishment to see that people just aren’t eating out as much today. Case in point: in April 2007, when I went to an annual work luncheon for my small team at a local Italian restaurant, every seat in the place was packed by noon; at this year’s meeting, our 10-person team accounted for about half of the crowd at lunchtime.

If you’re a restaurant operator, you may be going out of your mind right now trying to figure out how to prop up your dwindling business. With rising food prices making it more expensive to cook up that plate of fettuccine alfredo, and rising fuel prices making it more expensive for both customers to get to the dining table and for restaurants to get the ingredients to their kitchens, the situation seems pretty dire all around. But fear not, suffering restaurateurs! My 25 years of food-eating experience and I are here to offer you a selection of tasty tactics you can use not only to ride out the restaurant recession but to help you see your best sales in years.

1. Cut the fat off the menu. Well, not literally (we Americans love our lard, after all). If your menu is loaded with dishes that force you to keep expensive ingredients in stock while the dishes themselves aren’t that popular, you might want to move them off in favor of lighter, cheaper fare.
2. Substitute ingredients… carefully. Is anybody really gonna notice if you replace that fresh-chopped tomato sauce with Prego? With lighter customer volume, now might be a good time to play around with different brands and suppliers. Just don’t make tons of changes at once or you could stand to upset a few of the regulars.
3. Toss consumers a bone. Yes, you’re hurting financially, but that’s because we are too. While it might seem counterintuitive, lower menu prices and coupons can help bring in customers who might otherwise stay at home and heat up a can of soup.
4. Reward frequent diners. Keep ‘em coming back with deals like “pay 5 times, get the 6th meal on us.” Little rewards like this that make frequent customers feel special can help even the most budget-minded ignore rising food and fuel prices and sit themselves at your table week after week.
5. Cut hours, even days. If it’s costing you more in electricity and staff than you bring in to keep that restaurant open until midnight, consider closing at 10pm. Or if Mondays are slow, money-losing days, maybe you should give your eatery the day off.
6. Diversify. While cutting back on menu options is one way to cut costs, going the opposite direction might work too. In a dreary, upsetting economic environment like today, some customers may appreciate seeing some new and exciting dishes added to the menu. Or perhaps you could make some small tweaks to existing menu items to give them some extra ‘zaz and boink!
7. Leverage the power of the internet. Does your restaurant have a website? If not, you’re losing out on one cheap, easy way for customers to find out more about your restaurant. Even a basic web page with a menu and directions could bring in more patrons, especially if your cuisine is unique and hard to find in your area.
8. Get super-creative. Put your imagination to the test and see what you can come up with to help revitalize your restaurant’s image. Invest in your storefront, make Wednesday nights ’80s Karaoke Night, put in new dining furniture—the possibilities are only as endless as your savings account.
9. Remember: sex sells. No, I’m not suggesting you install a stripper pole in the middle of your restaurant’s dining room, but you probably could stand to capitalize a little more on your hot college girl wait staff. On a related subject, there aren’t nearly enough Maid cafés in this country.

Hopefully following some of these steps will have your restaurant on the road to booming business again in no time. No need to thank me, restaurant owners… though if you really want to, I certainly won’t turn down a complimentary seven-course feast in my honor.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when I noticed a package of boneless chicken breasts at the grocery store that cost $9 a pound. Nine dollars for one pound of chicken—the slowest, stupidest, least tasty of all grocery-quality animals. I could get some real breasts for less than that. Fortunately there were some chicken nuggets in the next aisle on sale for $2.50 a pound, so those yearning for their chix fix would not have to go home hungry.

Unfortunately this was only the first of outrageous grocery store surprises that would greet us on that trip. Most produce items had increased in price by 20% since last year, milk won the race against gasoline to $4 a gallon, and even ramen noodles had gone up in price to 12 cents a package instead of 10. Even filthy rich people are not immune to these increases; fancy-food retailer Whole Foods recently announced that, in an effort to avoid raising its prices, it will now be known as Three-Quarters Foods.

If you’re feeling the pinch in your pocket book when you purchase your products at the supermarket, you’re certainly not alone. And if buying the necessities of life are keeping you from being able to afford your skyrocketing mortgage or raging alcohol addiction, here are some steps you can take to take back your grocery stores from high prices.

1. Go on a diet. Statistically speaking, there is a good chance you are a fat tub o’ lard. (My apologies to the skinny bitches out there.) Take a close look at your diet and determine if you really need those 900 calories worth of potato chips you eat every day.
2. Grow everything yourself. It’s not as hard as you think to be self-sufficient with just a little hard work, some packets of seeds, and 12 acres of rich farmland. And lucky for you, 12 acres of prime farmland in your town can be had for just $3.7 million. Kiss expensive groceries goodbye!
3. Look at another store. I know a couple of people who haven’t been to more than one grocery store or supermarket in the last decade. In fact, my wife’s aunt has been going to the same corner grocery store for the last 32 years for all of her food and household needs, even after it became a post office in 1997. You might find that another store has the products you typically by for a little less than your usual place.
4. Consider alternatives. Don’t just limit yourself to substituting fresh and wholesome chicken for processed chicken nuggets. Love milk but can’t afford $4 a gallon? Buy powdered milk by the boxful—enough for gallons and gallons of a milk-like entity—for pennies on the dollar. The possibilities are endless; of course, so are the price increases, so you’ll eventually have to substitute everything you like to eat with whatever you find in the day-old section of the bakery.
5. Try online grocery shopping. One of the best parts of online grocery shopping is that it opens you up to a whole new world of deals and discounts that aren’t available in store. You’ll also find it can take half the time of in-store shopping without sacrificing quality.
6. Cut out the middle man. If only you could buy your apples, bread, and dead cow parts directly from the farmer instead of having to pay extra for the supermarket middle man. Well, you can—just swing by your local farmers’ market where you can find some of the best produce and other all-natural food items, often for a good deal less than you’ll pay in a store.
7. Join the shoplifting revolution! Okay, hear me out. If everyone starts shoplifting cartloads of groceries, supermarkets will have no choice but to drop their prices. Sure, some might call it looting, but I prefer the more modern term democratic price correction.

Yay! Now you can afford to eat again. Sadly, thanks to the high price of fuel, you can’t afford to drive to the grocery store anymore. But it doesn’t matter anyway because truckers can’t afford to deliver inventories to the stores. That $3.7 million for 12 acres doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?

Not unlike the Olive Garden and its transient never ending pasta bowl of lies, IHOP periodically offers a short-lived menu item geared towards us gluttons for food (and punishment)—the All You Can Eat Pancakes. Always a popular destination for poor college students looking to score breakfast treats at 9 o’clock in the evening, IHOP was a favorite of mine growing up due mostly to its Funny Face pancake: a chocolate pancake decorated with whipped cream, chocolate chips, and maraschino cherries arranged in the shape of a face that still haunts my waistline to this day. It was with youthful eagerness that I made my triumphant return to IHOP this weekend, but it was with utter disdain for my personal eating abilities that I left.

Choose Your Flapjack Battlefield

IHOP realizes that pancakes do not a meal make, so that’s why the All You Can Eat Pancakes meal always comes attached to an egg combo meal. At our local IHOP, the menu offered the following combos, all of which came with “unlimited” pancakes.

• Eggs only. Two eggs, any style. Hash browns too, I think. The cheapest unlimited pancake option. $4.99
• Eggs and bacon. The option I chose. Two eggs, a ridiculously large mound of hash browns, and four strips of bacon. $6.99
• Eggs and sausage. My wife went this route. Two eggs, that mountain o’ hash browns, four sausages. $6.99
• Eggs and ham. The eggs, the hash browns, and an unspecified quantity of ham. $6.99
• Eggs, sausage, and bacon. Eggs, hash browns, and three each of bacon strips and sausages. The priciest option. $7.99

Seniors of the Punny Money School of Buffet Tactics should quickly identify the first error we made at the IHOP table: we didn’t go with the cheapest option. We should have gone with the eggs only menu option. Instead, we each paid two dollars more for a tiny bit of extra breakfast meat. While meats are usually a goal item at buffets, they should not be at this one. Those strips of bacon and links of sausage probably took up two pancakes’ worth of stomach space. Lesson #1: Go “eggs only” at All You Can Eat Pancakes. For bonus points, slip the eggs into a purse and eat them later or the next day.

Pancakes Stacked A Mile High—In Midget Nautical Units

Accompanying your breakfast meat(s) will be the first round of unlimited pancakes: two flapjacks, each approximately four to six inches in diameter and 1/4 inches tall. I had heard complaints about the misrepresentation of the thickness of these pancakes in IHOP’s ads; while mine were a bit thinner than pictured, they were much healthier looking than some of the others I’ve heard people have encountered during the course of this promotion. On top of the first and subsequent stacks of pancakes is a wad of butter. Lesson #2: Don’t eat the butter. It’s heavy, and a few lumps of it will fill a pancake’s worth of stomach space.

In order to get your next serving of pancakes, you need to clear the first two from their plate. You do not need to finish your breakfast meats or hash browns to get more pancakes. Lesson #3: If you intend to eat them, make your breakfast meats last. I found keeping some eggs and bacon around for round two made it easier to get through more pancakes. Otherwise, if all you’re eating is pancakes, you may get sick of them pretty quickly. If you run out of breakfast meats, you may want to defy conventional buffet logic and invest in one of IHOP’s bottomless pots of coffee or another flavored drink to offer the occasional taste detour to endless pancakes.

The second and future stacks come in threes, but be sure to tackle each pancake individually rather than eating multiple layers of pancake at once. Lots of air can sit between pancakes, and that air can fill your poor tummy fast. Lesson #4: Take it one pancake at a time.

Service With a Smile, Eventually

As with any full-service unlimited food offering, you are at the mercy of the wait staff to bring you more pancakes. Another complaint I’ve read about IHOP’s pancake deal is that it takes forever to get subsequent stacks of flapjacks. There are some things you can do to increase the rate of service, even if you draw a slow server.

1. Dress rich. Bling yourself out with gold, diamonds, and anything else that makes you look worth at least a million bucks. Sure, you’ll look like Donald Trump in an inner-city whorehouse, but the server may recognize the potential for a bigger tip and stop by your table more frequently.
2. Make eye contact. If you need another stack o’ cakes and your server isn’t getting close enough to your table, you’ll need to catch his or her eye to draw them in. Give them that “come hither, my pancake slave” look and watch them come running.
3. Go with a friend. It’d be awfully sad if you went to a buffet by yourself, but I won’t judge you, fatty. If you hit this deal with someone else, you’ll clear plates more frequently, and you can split the next stack while waiting for another.
4. Activate your hash brown cloaking device. Those hash browns are especially useful for hiding your current serving of pancakes so you can show a clean plate and expedite your next round. Then you can dig out your pancake treasure while your next batch is cooking.

Be sure to make your tip reflect the server’s extra efforts (or lack thereof). If buffets are not the norm at a restaurant, 20% may not be enough to properly thank a server who keeps your plate full. Ours did a fabulous job and earned himself a 35% tip.

The Syrup Showdown

While a few folks may enjoy their pancakes au naturale, most of us will need a hefty dose of syrup to coat these wheatie wonders. Each table is normally equipped with four syrup dispensers; here were the choices available at our table:

• Old-fashioned syrup. This is pancake syrup with no added bells or whistles. By far your best choice for pancake deliciousness.
• Blueberry. I didn’t even try this one because I have bad memories involving blueberries and pancakes.
• Butter pecan. Probably your second-best option. A little sweeter than the standard syrup, but not too overpowering.
• Strawberry. Too sweet, and not a good substitute for putting strawberries on top of your pancakes. Maybe try one pancake with this, but don’t douse your whole pile in the stuff.

I also suggested to my wife that IHOP should offer alcoholic pancake syrup at a premium price. I bet your stomach could fit a lot more pancakes in it if the rest of you were numb.

The Endgame: Pancake Buffets are a Goldmine

I’m too embarrassed to reveal our exact pancake figures because we just could not get through very many of them. I knew going into it that this would be even harder than the Olive Garden pasta deal to get our money’s worth. Now that I’ve crunched the numbers, I realize that it’s not just hard, it’s downright impossible to eat even five bucks worth of pancakes at once. That’s because you can make about a dozen huge pancakes of comparable thickness and flavor to IHOP’s with two cups of Bisquick (cost: 20-30 cents max.) and another 25 cents of ingredients. To eat $5 of those pancakes, you’d need to plow through over 100 of them!

You better believe that IHOP is welcoming even the most experienced buffet eaters with open arms to this promotion. Personally, I’m surprised they don’t offer it more often and try to charge even more for it. At its price, it’s still one of the cheapest unlimited food deals around. But experienced buffet tacticians may want to save their money and invest it in tastier, more diverse menu options somewhere else.