This was my exact thought the first time one of those ladies who didn’t have a job said something along the lines of, “Look! By couponing I saved $300 at the grocery store, which is my contribution to our household!” Um…yeah, and it only took 60 hours of collecting, cutting and organizing coupons to do. Try getting a real job - you’ll make more money with less effort, I promise.
It wasn’t this show that caused problems for me, (I only use coupons for things I need). Last year, there was an extreme coupon lady on Ellen. She had been doing it for years and had a whole section of her house as a giant pantry, for the things she had gotten deals on. Ellen was praising her on being so “frugal”.
WTF! She was a hoarder!
After that, all the coupon printing sites reach their limit within a few hours, for the really good ones. And those little coupon dispenser things, at the grocery store, are always empty. Even if I intend to pay full price on something like coffee or detergent, I have to go to several different stores just to find it, if there is a current coupon for that brand.
I hate these shows. My Sunday newspaper had been stolen 3 times in August. Some schlub decided to just get their coupons from all those papers laying in everyone’s driveway. There was an insert in subsequent weeks alerting the neighborhood that papers were being taken, and a number to call to report if you see anyone taking papers.
I have actually changed my buying habits in the last couple of years to avoid the coupon thing. I felt that if I wasn’t willing to play the coupon game, I wasn’t willing to be the idiot paying full price for stuff. Now I shop mainly at Costco (and yeah, I do use their coupon book, but its easy and no cutting involved), Trader Joes, Fresh and Easy, and Sprouts. No games! Just one price for everyone.
You interest me strangely.
What is this program? I rarely, if ever, use coupons, but with something like this I might. As long as it runs on a computer; I has no smartphone.
I pay $10 every 2 months, and I get an online list of recommended items, items that are at some discount, and sometimes a few items that wind up free, at my chosen store. Typically my savings from coupons and sale shopping are at least $30 a week, sometimes $40-50, so $5 a month plus the cost of the paper is well worth it. If you want, you add more stores to your plan for $5 each (billing every 2 months), IIRC.
You need to keep 12 weeks worth of coupons to keep up with what they recommend. I sometimes clip the ones I’d use and keep them in a photo album sorted by aisle, or sometimes I just hold onto the circulars, since the Grocery Game tells you which circular each recommended coupon is in.
Each week I check off the box next to any item that I want to buy, and the site generates a list I print and take shopping with me. No smartphone required. I feel like it’s a decent balance between investment and savings. And if I didn’t have an obnoxious 3yo who will wreck my coupons like a tornado, so I could clip and sort anytime, anywhere, it would be even easier!
Not sure where you are, but here in eastern upstate NY, Price Chopper is now running double coupons (up to 99 cents) all the time. And it’s a true double, which is nice, as the coupons I’m more likely to use are under $1 for single items, meaning the savings is rather substantial. Especially if I can pair it with a store coupon and/or other deal.
We had a strange situation in the UK a few months ago where Tesco was effectively paying you to take certain goods off them. They have this price matching service where you go to the website, type in the receipt number and it compares the total to another major chain, ASDA. If ASDA is cheaper, you get a voucher for the difference.
But, during this promotion, you would get twice the difference. This meant that, if the price in ASDA was less than half of the Tesco price, the voucher would be worth more than you paid for the item. For a few items, the ASDA price was indeed less than half, particularly stuff that ASDA happened to have on special offer. Bargain-hunting forums were immediately on the case, and people were walking out of Tesco with carts full of detergent or wine or whatever, and getting paid for it!
(I should say, there is a monthly limit to the vouchers you can earn. You couldn’t make a living doing this!)
I’ve seen only one episode of this ever, but in it the guy who was doing the extreme couponing was doing it in large part to create care packages for soldiers.
See, now that is awesome and something I can wholeheartedly get behind. I’ve only seen it in bits here and there, aside from the promos. I guess that’s the problem with TLC promos in general; most of them make the shows look like complete trash.
I’ve only seen one or two episodes of this show, and mostly I saw hoarders and junk food junkies*, but I recall one couple who couponed to donate to a local food pantry. Several years ago, I did something similar when I had more spare time than spare money, and a friend who delivered the local Sunday paper: I would spend one evening a week clipping all of the coupon inserts my friend picked up on Monday morning, then shop the triple coupon day at the grocery store, plus the double coupon day at the discount store. I pretty much kept my household, my mother’s, and my grandmother and some of her limited-income friends in soap, shampoo, toothpaste, pet food, and convenience foods for just a few dollars a month, and donated the rest to the local food bank. As hobbies go, it was kind of fun and rewarding.
*I’m probably the only person on earth who remembers that novelty song, right?
Nope, I’m old too. 
Damn straight. There’s nothing admirable about being a food hoarder.
I’ve never seen the show, but it seems to me that “extreme couponing” is just the latest in a string of money-saving (or money-making) techniques that you see on TV, but don’t/wouldn’t really work for real people.
I remember a while back we kept hearing about people having extravagant weddings at little cost to them by using corporate sponsorships. A friend of mine actually looked into it, and it didn’t seem to her like a real possibility.
In fact they don’t even scan every coupon. I had a few. She scanned one to prove I got the booklet then threw them all in the trash. The computer just assumes if I had one I had them all and gave me all the discounts I qualified for.
Grocery stores and food manufacturers aren’t stupid and the couponing thing has been going on for many years. If there was an undesirably exploitable loophole, it would have been closed rapidly. The truth is, the extreme vanguard of the couponing movement is a tiny proportion and serves as a loss leader. What it serves to do is get more people into couponing which serves the interests of the stores. Why else would grocery stores willingly co-operate with the TLC show?
Really, I mean, consider how many people have probably tried (and failed) at extreme couponing because “it looked so easy on the telly.” That’s got to be some good money in people who just royally eff it up.
I’m in PA so it must be a regional thing. Anyway, it seemed like all the coupons I’d bring on double/triple coupon day were ones that said “do not double” in eeny-weeny print. Coupon savvy I ain’t 
There was an article in one of the women’s magazines (Good Housekeeping?) about an extreme couponer whose best deal was 28 boxes of cereal for something like $2.37. All I could think was, who the hell could eat that much cereal before it went stale? Even with 6 of us growing up it probably would have taken half a year at least, and if they were all the same kind of cereal we’d have mutinied after a couple weeks.
It would be nice to donate it to a food bank or something, but the idea of scrounging for circulars, spending hours cutting coupons, and breaking down the doors of the store on the first day of the sale do not appeal.
Make no mistake, there’s no altruistic motive behind coupons or sales.
Coupons in particular, are a scheme to get the segment of the population who are easily swayed by an item’s price (“price sensitive”) to buy those items.
The scheme goes like this: A can of peas costs the manufacturer 10 cents to produce. The can of peas is sold for 50 cents.
If you sell 100 cans a week, you make $50 and have $10 in costs, for a net profit of $40.
Let’s say that you could sell a further 25 cans if you drop the price to 30 cents a can. You’d make net profit of $4.50 on those cans, that YOU WOULDN’T HAVE OTHERWISE MADE had you not dropped the price.
Since you want everyone willing to pay 50 cents a can to pay that, you make the discount to 30 cents a can dependent on the consumer jumping through a few hoops- getting the paper, clipping the coupon, and remembering to bring the coupon and use it. This will dissuade the non-price sensitive from bothering, but allow you to sell your 30 cent cans to the people willing to go to the trouble.
Either way you make money, but you make more if you include the coupon.
That’s the logic for normal coupons. The entire tenet of extreme couponing is that you can combine deals in such a way that you get products for well below cost. If you watch some of these shows, people are getting $500 worth of goods for $5 or less.