What’s this show called … Extreme Couponing?

For this week’s column I watched a show that my wife picked out for me … well, let’s more accurately put it this way: my wife read about a show that sounded wildly ridiculous to her, and she enthusiastically told encouraged me to review it for my column.

The show, of course, is none other than TLC’s newest entry into the “People are willing to be seen on TV doing anything so that they can be seen on TV” genre, Extreme Couponing. Which, interestingly enough, may very well be the origin story for another TLC original, Hoarding: Buried Alive. Just a thought.

Extreme couponers are people who have elevated clipping Sunday coupons into what can only be described as a profession (if you’re avoiding calling it an obsession). Spending close to forty hours per week preparing for shopping trips, the people featured on Extreme Couponing somehow manage to annually stock their families with free merchandise worth in the tens of thousands of dollars. How do they do it? Well, that’s their secret and they don’t seem keen on sharing.

You see, while I followed how both Missy and Amy accomplished their missions, what was missing was the where and how they obtain hundreds of copies of merchant coupons. In-store sales and offers are either available with a bonus card or by stockpiling circulars, but most merchant coupons can’t be obtained quite that easily … that is, as far as us average Joes know.

Missy says she’s basically paid to shop. Not quite, but I’d hope so considering the fact that she’s spent money to knock down a wall in her house and build a coupon room, not to mention the shelving units necessary for storing all the extra merchandise, the bins for the coupons, the extra refrigerator or two, and subscriptions to many copies of multiple newspapers in order to get her coupons. Plus, you know, gas for the car. I’m sure she comes out ahead in the end, but not to the extent that the show would have us believe.

Of course, what is it that she comes out ahead with? The episode showed her on a shopping trip that included the purchasing of sixty four bottles of laundry detergent and one hundred and fourteen — you read that right — bottles of pain reliever medication. Yes she spent $4.53 and saved $1,161.22 — shocking, to be sure — but don’t medications have expiration dates? Unless she’s supplying a group suicide pact I’m not sure how that doesn’t go to waste.

What was very cool was how multiple discounts on the pain reliever provided her with what’s known as an “overage,” a credit that the store pays you in merchandise. With her overage Missy stocked up on meat … if she needed to throw out all of the pain reliever just to get fifty dollars worth of free meat, I think she won that round.

Amy thinks that this is somehow a talent or gift of hers, the ability to hunt down deals and buy in bulk. A little weird, but so too was what she bought in the store: as opposed to Missy, who seemed to be shopping both for the items she had coupons for as well as other things, Amy seemed not to know about overages, and instead set her eyes only on items that were on sale or free. The result? She bought ninety three bags of croutons, fifteen frozen cans of juice, and twenty nine trays of noodles. Now I’m not telling her what to feed her family — and she did only spend $9.10 and save $393.21 — but there’s a difference between saving on items that your family needs, and buying anything that’s cheap. How much soup could she make?

The moments of drama were artificial and kind of laughable: Missy discovered that the same bar code could only be rung up 100 times on one transaction; Amy found that the store had a strict 250 coupon limit on one transaction. Yes, issues for them in their respective moments, but also of the absurd variety.

It was definitely interesting to watch both women work, and for sure most of us don’t even know how much we could be saving if we just tried a little. But as a TV show, let alone a life’s work? No thanks.

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Apr 27, 2011 @ 14:31 EST5EDT