Re: issuing miles for non-flight activity. Was at Wal-Mart today (yep, I'm a low-rev) and saw that DL is doing a tie-in with Coca-Cola in several southern states where you get 5 SkyMiles per 2-liter Coke bottle (by entering a code on the cap over the Internet; there's a cap on miles you can earn).

What product could be more ubiquitous than Coke? And as for hard numbers on non-flight miles issued, the fact that they are so hard to come by should be an additional red flag.

Maybe a news outlet like the New York Times or WSJ should devote some serious investigative resources into finding out how much revenue that Leo, Gordo and others are looking for from these non-flight miles that are looking more and more like raffle tickets.