Extreme Couponing

I was sitting here earlier with absolutely nothing to do. I was down here with the kids while they watched TV and drifted to sleep and I was debating what to do and was even blogging about it. Then Kara texted me to put on channel 28 – TLC – for the last 20 minutes of a show. I went upstairs to see what I needed to watch. It was a show called “Extreme Couponing.” It was about people who spend hours upon hours clipping coupons to save money at the supermarket. Since I only saw the last 20 minutes the one guy I saw on the show seemed overly ridiculous with his clipping.

His entire garage was stocked like a supermarket. He and his wife had supplies enough for the next 20 years, or so. They had canned foods, toiletries, and other items that they’d bought in bulk simply because they had coupons for them. This dude had a huge binder, the kind you’d use for collecting trading cards, filled with coupons; and he spent hours on the computer researching what was on sale in different stores in his area. The one shopping excursion I saw him on he bought over $5000 worth of stuff for around $240. Now, you might think it’s awesome; I thought it was really ludicrous.

First of all, the amount of time he spent searching for the deals and calculating how much he’d save was more time than I have available in a day. He literally found specific items that he had coupons for; then found them on sale in a specific store; took the original price, deducted the store sale price, deducted the coupon amount, and doubled it because his store doubles coupons, then decided if it was worth purchasing. Some of the items were worth it but I think he went way overboard with it.

He had coupons for toothbrushes that left them costing him nothing. He bought all of the toothbrushes that were on sale, and there had to be over a hundred of them in the bin. He literally dumped the bin of toothbrushes into his cart. It was his way of not having to buy toothbrushes for the next couple of years. Hey, stupid, what about other shoppers who may need to buy toothbrushes for their households? Then he bought sixty bottles of hand soap simply because they were only going to cost him $.30 each after coupons and sales deductions. Sixty bottles of hand soap because, as he said, “We won’t have to buy hand soap for a long time to come.” Again, genius, are you and your wife the only two people in the world who use hand soap? He then did the exact same thing with deodorant for himself. Just wiped the shelf clean and put all the stuff into his cart.

This went on and on with him. He bought items like this all through the store and had six or seven store employees following him with all the additional carts he needed to carry the stuff. He had to ring up the merchandise as three different orders because the scanner can only handle 500 items per order. His first batch came to over $900 and after sales and coupons he only paid around $55. His second batch came to over $800 and he ended up paying about $35. That’s fine but, even though he mentioned he had some, the cameras didn’t show one item of food in the first two batches of stuff he bought. Other than the soda, it was all toiletries.

Finally, his third order was something he had to special order from the store because he knew they wouldn’t have enough of them on the shelves. Now, this was a food item and he had a huge stack of coupons for it. The item, after sales and doubled coupons cost him almost nothing. What was it? “Total” cereal was the big item. He’d depleted the shelves of it, and he’d ordered more boxes shipped to the store so he could buy it with his coupons (1100 boxes in all); he paid virtually nothing for it and then took it home and donated the whole lot of it to a local food pantry. Are you fucking kidding me? Was it a nice gesture for him to donate to the food pantry? Absolutely; I’m not saying it’s not. But no food pantry needs 1100 boxes of the same cereal, and there are probably more people in the town where he lives who might actually want to buy some of that cereal since it was on sale.

Seems to me like this guy just gets his rocks off by seeing how much he can save after his hours of tedious coupon clipping. I can understand stocking up on non-perishables but not for the next 20 years just because the item is available in the store and on sale. Gimme a break!! Had he gone shopping and bought $1000 worth of real food items and only paid $100 for it all, I’d have been impressed. However his over-exuberance of buying shit simply to buy it and save money was really ridiculous. I have no need to buy 60 bottles of hand soap for $.30 each; I need to buy 60lbs of ground beef at $.30 a pound instead. Can he show me how to do that? I doubt it, but I guess the show's producers thought this guy’s “skill” at coupon clipping was worth filming. Whatever.

I’ll have to search the Internet to find the entire show so I can see what I missed. Maybe the other people profiled had better advice for clipping coupons and saving money on items I can actually use. I’ll let you know if I find it. In the meantime, if any of you have any money-saving tips for me, I’d appreciate hearing about them. I’m always on the lookout for a bargain; I just don’t want to be buying shit I can’t use for ten years when my kids have specific needs right now. I’m really not into being greedy, either, just getting what I need at a bargain price. Who knows? Maybe I can be on that show if I can find a way to save lots of money at the supermarket. I’ll just make sure I leave merchandise on the shelves for other people who are also bargain hunting; and that I buy real food and not just a garage load of toiletries. I’ll see what I can do.

Until next time…peace to all.