In the good old days, you could buy US savings bonds, use Citibank's c2it, some people bought gift cards to accumulate many miles.....you know what I mean.

What ways are there to accumulate serious miles today (other than flying or just charging on credit cards, which I already do)?

Which airlines do you fly? Have you tried going to the relevant FF program website(s) and researching there?

This is a good site:

http://www.freefrequentflyermiles.com/index.htm

msv

AA - yes I have, thanks, but nothing jumps out other than routine stuff - like shopping, etc, which doesn't allow extraordinary accumulation, and I'm not taking a 2nd mortgage just to accumulate miles.

search "churning" on FT. you can accumulate 20k every 2 to 3 months on AA, baseline. many have pushed it by churning more than one AA card.

move to Canada then you can shop at Safeway. They often have funny sales like $6CAD for 2 bottles of laundry detergent, you would get 50 airmiles, which are worth either $6CAD in SHELL GAS alone, or you can fly with them (about 1700 airmiles for a domestic ticket or 7000 for international)

married 2 miles wants all the miles without flying.
You could try opinionPlace.com and earn some miles by taking a survey.

Do the current Delta promo. Activities are 1000 miles each and many are without flying or cash. You can get up to 25K in 5K blocks. Check it out on the Delta forum.

JudyJFLA

Airline check-in staff can collect miles from passengers without flying..

Coop (Switzerland), our largest food chain in Switzerland, 'pays' one Coop Superpoint per SFr spent. One Coop Superpoint can be transferred into 0.5 miles&more miles (miles&more isthe frequent flier program of Lufthansa, swiss, Austrian and LOT). Superpoints can be transferred from any account to any other one free of charge and that's why they are heavily traded on aution platforms like ebay and Ricardo in Switzerland and Germany before being transferred into miles (where trading is not allowed anymore).

I myself did that way accumulate over 5 Million miles&more miles in the last 12 months (and my average price per mile is now way below 1 US cent/mile).

From time to time there are promotions to earn extra points on specific articles, and also from time to time the exchange rate Superpoints:miles&more miles was 1:1 in the past (limited time only).

Also, but not cheap, most FrequentFlier programs allow you to buy miles from them (but I really don't recommend this, unless you fast need just a few more miles).

Interesting.

Rudi, do you know whether there's an online application, and if not, where the closest Coop is to MLH?

application link (use one of the following world languages: french, german or italian , you don't have to learn swiss german)

and the next coop is only some 5'000 flight miles away, think of the additional miles you can earn if flying in first class to that Coop in GVA ...

Rudi, I must be misreading your post.
The way I read it, you have spent between 5 million and 10 million francs at the grocery store in the past 12 months. (For other Americans, the exchange rate today is about 1.22 SWf per dollar.)
What am I doing wrong?

For those in the U.S.:
look on pgary's web site under buying stuff - groceries for information about S&H greenpoints. You get 10 greenpoints per dollar at various regional grocery chains (no national chains, alas). These convert to various airline miles. It works out to 0.562 miles per dollar normally, but there are frequent offers of 2x to 5x points/dollar on certain products and/or certain size purchases. The chain in my area, Lowe's Foods, has some kind of multiplier offer essentially all the time. At the moment, they have two that can be stacked: double points on certain products and triple points on any order over $100.

well, it's a little too far to shop, and how did you accumulate 5MM miles shopping in one year?

It seems pretty obvious to me how Rudi earned these points. Not from that many groceries!