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Filed under: Food, Saving, Travel

I’ve been thinking for hours about cows. Well, not for hours, but for several minutes at a time, over the course of several hours. I mean, I have a life. Sort of.

In a recent short story in MediaPost, they mentioned that Chick-Fil-A is planning its fourth annual Cow Appreciation Day, which doesn’t get moo-ving (sorry) until July 11. Anyone who shows up in a cow costume gets a free meal, and as it turns out, generally several thousand people usually are game.

And I thought it was interesting, and I wanted to tell people about it, in case they wanted to get ready. After all, it’s not like you can run into any Walgreens or Wal-Mart and grab a cow costume. You kind of have to plan ahead, I imagine.

So I started doing a little research and realized that this is just the tip of the creative iceberg. Every time Chick-Fil-A opens a new stand-alone restaurant (separate from, say, a shopping mall), it gives out free coupons to the first 100 people — 52 coupons for a free combo meal, reasoning that if you use one a week, it’s a year’s worth of free food. And as it turns out, these coupon giveaways result in people standing in line and spending the night to get their chance at free food.

Even more, some people have been making it a habit of doing this more than once. A reporter in Bentonville, Arkansas interviewed three young guys from…

WalletPop:

Filed under: Extracurriculars, Real Estate, Shopping, Wealth, Travel, Investing

Reuters is reporting that the 24th richest man in the world is planning on spending $150 million starting a magazine, web site and TV station called — get ready — Snob.

Snob has slightly a different meaning in Russia. They think of a snob as someone who has made a lot of money in life and is entitled to brag about it if they want. In America, of course, we see a snob as someone who looks down on others who aren’t as rich or as classy, and thus, the rest of us tend to look down on snobs. At any rate, Andrei Shmarov, one of the billionaire creating Snob, told Reuters, “It’s for people who are successful and those who want to be successful.”

The web site will be out in June, the magazine in July, and it will focus on lifestyle, business and travel articles. The cable channel will follow shortly after that.

But Shmarov isn’t the only billionaire working on this project. One of his partners, according to the Moscow Times, is Mikhail Prokhorov, the fifth richest person in the world. He told the paper that the web site will have a social networking site. Don’t bother looking for it online, though. This is the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” routine. The snobs at Snob are inviting about 3,000-5,000 people or so to be charter members on the social networking site. They only want educated, successful professionals.

“Wealth is not a criterion for…