A new show will debut on TLC in April called “Extreme Couponing”. Yes, it’s a reality show. Yes, it’s about crazy ass people cutting coupons. Yes, I watched the one hour special and was both horrified and thrilled and curious all at once. Extreme Couponing is, well, extreme!
We’ve all seen the stories about men and women going to the grocery store and stocking up on hundreds of dollars of groceries and walking away paying only a few dollars at best. Is this even possible? Well, yes. And no.
Cutting coupons is all well and good - I do it myself, but seriously, how many Sunday circulars and online coupon sites really have coupons for the exact products you need on a weekly basis? If you are like me, probably not a whole lot of them. Sure, there are coupons for cereal and pasta sauce and maybe bread and peanut butter. But when I’m spending over $100 at the market and I have 3 coupons that total $1.35, it sure doesn’t seen like the effort is worth it.
These extreme couponers not only cut coupons, they actually send away for them. There are companies that do nothing but mail out coupons to people who have spent hours and hours painstakingly pouring over grocery flyers and online websites just to figure out which coupons are going to save them the most money. These coupon junkies end up PAYING…. yes I said PAYING… for these companies to send them the coupons. That is something they don’t tell you on the reality shows. So when someone is stocking up on 114 FREE boxes of cereal… some Producer is failing to tell you that person paid $70 in fees to obtain those coupons. Okay, so $0.50 per box of cereal is great… but who the hell needs 114 boxes of cereal?
One family on the show had enough toilet paper stocked to last them 40 years. 40 YEARS?????
The problem with going to the extreme with couponing is that you end up doing nothing but stocking up on the staples. Paper goods, canned goods, cereal, pasta… I hate to break it to you, but if you have more than a month’s supply of any of these products… you are a “Hoarder”. And that’s another show entirely.
Sometimes cutting coupons does add up… sometimes it doesn’t. I’m still going to clip and print them but I can’t see myself ever being extreme about it. My time is too precious to spend hours and hours figuring out how to save a quarter on my next chicken leg.
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