Plus to really make this level of couponing work, you pretty much have to have somewhere that will have double coupon days, and I have never found a supermarket near me (in the suburbs of Chicago) that ever does that. I’ve even searched online, and the coupon websites pretty much conclude that there aren’t any here.
Or, as a friend of mine once put it, “It’s the perfect pastime for bored SAHMs.”
Here’s what bugs me.
As another poster pointed out, coupons make sense for the price sensitive customer. They buy something the wouldnt buy without a coupon, getting something they want. The makers get to sell something that otherwise wouldn’t be sold and still make a profit. Its a win win.
But at some point, when you game the shit out of the system and get something very very cheap, free, or god forbid payed to take it that just ain’t right.
IMO that’s just theft plain and simple.
Yep - it’s the same here in Minneapolis. Only a few stores have double coupon days, and then only one or two days a week, and then only up to certain dollar amounts (generally $1 - and if you have a coupon for say $1.50, it doesn’t double at all, only $1 or less), and then they’ll only double a certain amount of coupons. (The store I’m most familiar with limits it to 5 manufacturer’s coupons on double coupon day, sometimes 10.) And they won’t ever let the total go negative, so they won’t give you money back - the lowest your total can go is $0.00.
I’m afraid that if I watch any of the “extreme couponing” shows, I’ll end up killing someone at work. Right now I’m working at a popular national chain store which has a weekly circular with coupons, a monthly coupon book, and of course also accepts manufacturer’s coupons combined with the store-specific coupons. We have our share of “coupon ladies” who come in with binders filled with coupons from time to time, but then we have the “extreme coupon” wannabes who come in and try to clear the shelves or try something blatantly against coupon policies like (and this is my favorite) one guy who came in, brought something like 40 bottles of shampoo and conditioner up to the counter, with a “buy one, get one free” coupon for EACH BOTTLE and expected to, I suppose, just pay for one bottle. Apparently in this guy’s brain, it would go like this: “I buy A, then get B free. I got B, so I can get C for free, I got C so I can get D for free (and so on)” Um, no, my friend. If you got B for free THEN YOU DIDN’T BUY IT, therefore the coupon does not get applied. It’s not how many bottles were SCANNED, it’s how many you actually BOUGHT. When I told him that wasn’t how the coupons worked, he got angry and said, “I did it just fine this morning at [other store]!” OK, well in that case we ca-WAIT, you bought 40 bottles of shampoo and conditioner for essentially nothing earlier today?? Exactly how many showers do you plan on taking each day??
Ugh. So I want to torture the makers of shows like this, moreso even than I want to torture the Antiques Roadshow people for convincing people that all of their useless junk at flea markets and garage sales must be worth 30 times the price they originally paid for it.
Don’t worry. When some bastard comes along with an antique coupon and gets it for 1/60th its value the circle of life will be complete 
In Germany, we get far less coupons: only for certain companies, only certain stores, never combining them. The few coupons I get from payback programs are always towards big name brands: buy Ariel detergent, get 0.50 Euro off, buy Vidal Sassoon shampo, get 1 Euro off, etc.
However, Ariel detergent costs more than double than generic store detergent, similar for Vidal Sasoon and other name brands. I don’t buy name brands without coupouns, because they are too expensive*, and even with coupons they still cost more than the generic store brands. So I wonder how people can save money with them.
- The other reason I don’t buy name brands from the mega-corps is that I dislike their politics re: manufacturing, human rights, enviromental protection etc., where a particular store has a much better policy for its own brands.
I just watched part of this show last night; I’d never seen it before. HOARDER was my first thought when they showed the shelves and shelves of crap these people have bought.
My mom did coupons way back when I was a kid. There were only one or two stores that did double-coupons. We’d go about twice a year and get several carts of stuff, all with coupons. I remember register tapes that were 10-15 feet long.
She never got “shelf-clearing” quantities, just normal quantities to cover a family of 6 for a few months. Even so, I remember some stuff that sat around the house for years because no one would eat it. She’d had a coupon so she got it. (This didn’t happen terribly often, but there were a few.)
I’ll clip the occasional coupon, but when I look through them, most of them are for stuff I don’t want. We don’t eat much prepared food and generally buy store-brand or generic for cleaning supplies and such.
I’m sure as hell not willing to treat it like a job - I have a job. My stay-home partner isn’t either, she’s got better things to do with her time. Hell, she gets paid more than that when she does the occasional odd job.
I got sucked in by the marathon of this show yesterday, and I felt a little creepy. 
I did like the young seminary student who was gaming the coupon/store loyalty card system to get $1000 worth of groceries for free to donate to his church’s various community outreaches.
And did anyone else notice how much CRAP these people buy?!? Nasty, pre-packaged foods that seem very high in salt, fat, and empty calories. Yuck.
But of course, coupons are usually for crap items- rarely do meats, fluid milk or produce have coupons or discounts.
Indeed. I grew up in a small town which, at the time, had three(!) grocery stores (1960’s). Dad was the town attorney, so Mom always shopped all three stores.
One week, when she was laid up with a broken foot, she sent her children off to shop (6 of us, 2 to each store, with a list). We were told that we could each get two boxes of cereal.
In a sad coincidence, we each bought two boxes of Crispy Critters (as I recall, there was some sort of “send in X box tops for a crappy prize” promotion going on). No more cereal entered the house until the last box was gone - I remember “Crispy Critter” days, as we attempted to eat it all.
Joe
“Call for orange Mooooose!”
The way they justify that is they are able to spend more on fresh foods when the other stuff ends up being so cheap or free.
And occasionally I have seen them stock up on milk and meat so some stores must do coupons for those items.
But I agree to a point…I could/would never have that much pre-packaged food around.
The thing you have to remember about the folks on this show is that a lot of them are showing off for the cameras.
On their regular grocery trips they’re probably buying a lot of meat, dairy, produce and other items they don’t have coupons for. I’m sure they still manage to save a shitload of money on the stuff they do have coupons for, but they’re not getting $600 worth of groceries for five bucks, or some other ridiculously low amount, on a regular basis either.
But when the cameras are rolling, their goal is to get as much stuff for as little as possible (which makes for good TV), so they go on double or triple coupon weeks and get only the things they have coupons for.
And while they may be getting a few items for their stockpile each time they go to the grocery, I doubt that most of these people are buying, say, 100 jars of mustard or a couple of cases worth of vitamin water each and every week.
The one that bothered me waas the couple who bought tons of stuff and then took it over to the local food pantry. So far so good. But as they were leaving, the pantry attendant handed them a receipt fro the value of the goods.
I couldn’t help wondering if that receipt was going to be counted as a donation on their income tax. . . for the full retail value of the goods that they were actually paid (in other food items) to take out of the store.
For the items like milk and meat that don’t ever have coupons - that’s what they use the overages for. The stoe won’t give them cash if they come out negative, but they can always use the overage to cover the cost of other items they need.
It’s not like there’s a bunch of grocery store execs standing around in Command HQ looking around in a horrified manner, exclaiming “Oh no! They found a loophole!”
They know exactly what these people are doing and there’s a reason the system is still set up so this is possible.
I tried the couponing thing. It takes alot of time and work.
I started out in April and gave up in August, just 4 months. In that 4 months I was able to amass a somewhat decent stockpile. No food mind you, just cleaning supplies, health and beauty products, and paper products. One of the downsides of the “Extreme Coupon” show was the stolen ads in the Sunday papers and stolen papers from the newspaper machines. I ended up having to go to my local CVS, where I would check each paper to make sure the required coupon ads were in each paper before purchasing them. I usually bought 10 copies.
Then I later found out that stuff like body wash, shampoo, conditioner, lotion etc can deterioratete over time. So last week, I brought 80% of my stockpile to work and gave it away to my co workers. They said, I should have gotten money for it, but since I got most of it for free, I really didn’t care.
I kept all my paper products, air freshners, and KY Jelly lube 