We got an episode of an American show over here on the weekend, called Extreme Couponing.
This show just amazed me. (in a bad sort of amazed I suppose).
Part of the interest I think, was ‘they’re weird over there response’ While coupons are reasonably common in Australia, they’re a long way from the level you seem to be able to achieve if you put in the time and effort the people on the show did.
I was very surprised though that stores allow this sort of thing to go on. One of the two people featured on the episode I saw spent five hours at the register checking out. So not only did this couple purchase ~$500 worth of stuff for around 20 bucks, they tied up a staff member and a register for half the day.
I gather some of the coupons are manufacturer issued, so presumably the retail store gets some sort of compensation for those from the manufacturer, but they seem to take a big hit on a lot of stuff.
So I’m guessing that the number of people that get seriously into this and do fill up trolleys for cents in the dollar of the original price are so low that the loss to the store is immaterial in the grand scheme of things? Is that a fair assumption?
The show is staged and what you see on the screen is simply not possible in reality, the stores waive their normal coupon policy to allow the kind of stuff you see on the show. I don’t have the time to find a cite but there was a news story awhile back about some grocery chain angry at the show, it mentioned that they waived their normal policies for the dramatic hauls seen on the show(and presumably are reimbursed by TLC).
Just for instance you will often see on the show the shoppers have a coupon for a new product that gives you the item free and they have thirty coupons and clear the shelf, I have never seen a store that will allow more than one per customer(or party even) per day or visit. The show is total fantasy what if nonsense.
Why is the grocery chain so angry if they’re the ones who waived their policy in the first place? In fact, what would be the motivation for them waiving their policy? I saw a couple episodes of this show and I don’t recall the stores being promoted. I don’t think they even mentioned the name of the stores or made any shots which would allow a viewer to readily identify them.
The store felt they were shown in a bad light, I don’t know why the stores waive their policy but here look its well known the whole show is a staged fraud:
If you look you can find people reporting the same issue for other stores and chains, that events are staged in store and normal coupon policy is lifted for the show only. Its a total fraud.
Before the advent of the show I thought I was a hard-core couponner. Compared to those folks I’m a rank amateur. I routinely spend about two hours on coupons each week before ever hitting a store. That time includes clipping and sorting new coupons and weeding out expired ones, and matching up coupons with store specials.
My typical savings on a well planned trip is (if the register tape is to be believed) is between 40% and 45%. I have had a few instances where I ended up paying -$0.10 for an item. I’m not looking to cheat the store or make anyone’s day difficult.
I never take my loaded cart and fist full of coupons to the front during peak times.
Since I focus on what’s on sale most things I buy have a limit. That’s the first thing I noticed when I watched the show. My experience doesn’t allow for one person buying 110 of the same brand of yogurt in one trip.
I think that for the people on the show it’s left the realm of a way to save a little money and become a near obsession. I’ve never encountered one of these folks in real life, but they must be shopping somewhere.
I watched an episode of this when it was screened in the UK - I must admit I thought some of it must be staged since I don’t know of any supermarket that would be happy for you to enlist the help of their staff to push your four shopping trolleys around the store and also clean them out of their supplies of whatever product it was, to the point where the shelf was empty and they had also emptied the stocks from out the back.
Whilst I can see the value of using a few money-saving coupons, you were then treated to scenes from peoples’ homes where they’d had to convert the garage or build an extension so that they could store all the cheap stuff they’d stockpiled.
What was most amusing though, was the fact this programme was followed by something about hoarders!
It’s the latest version of Costco Syndrome, where you snap up all those “good deals” on stuff, but then you need to buy some sort of storage solution to house those extra pianos that you bought because they were so cheap in the warehouse club six-pack.
Or more likely, you’ll need a place to stash the rest of that small child-sized bale of paper towels, the gallon bottles of pasta sauce and ten cans of cream of mushroom soup.
With coupon clipping that could best be described as absent-minded and paying modest attention to the store sales, I often net around a 30% savings without even trying hard.
Likewise, you can’t get the same sort of extreme coupon savings in Canada either. For instance, some stores in the U.S. have double or triple coupon days where each coupon is worth 2x or 3x as much as usual; I’ve never seen that anywhere that I’ve lived in Canada.
I have some first hand experience with this. About 13 years ago, my wife got into couponing in a very big way, trading them on message boards, etc. We hate this show—every store has policies against the sort of things they get away with. And believe me, the cashiers are not at all friendly when someone comes through with that many coupons and there’s no TV camera there. She only did the couponing for a few months before we realized we were spending an awful lot of time and energy to save money, or often even get things for free, that we didn’t even need. I believe the straw that broke the camel’s back was when we bought something like ten boxes of Nestle Quick cereal just because we were able to get it for free with the coupons. We didn’t even like the stuff, and yet my wife was willing to get into an argument with the store manager over it. (He wanted to limit the purchase, but there was no visible policy to that effect, etc…)
But this show is total nonsense. I spoke with a cashier at the local supermarket recently—he hates it too, because more and more people are coming in trying to get away with what they see on TV and getting upset with him when it doesn’t work.
Plenty of places in the US don’t have it either. I live in the suburbs of Chicago and once researched what grocery stores around me will do double coupons, and from what I could tell, none were within an hour of me and they were all widely-scattered, individual, small grocery stores that I’d never heard of. That means you miss out on any chain store deals/customer card deals that usually add in with the double couponing.
In my recollection “extreme couponing” was possible a long time ago, when there were no limits on the number of coupons and you were allowed to stack multiple coupons on one item. One of the summer jobs I had as a teenager was working as a grocery store clerk, and I still remember scanning someone through and thinking they were done only to watch them pull out a large stack of coupons.
One of the other reasons those things aren’t allowed any more–other than obviously they cut significantly into a manufacturer’s profits–is that they’re annoying as fuck to a cashier. It’s one thing when you’ve got one coupon for one item that’s 50 cents off–the register can handle that. But when you’ve got two or more coupons that stack on an item, coupons that have no marked value and the cashier has to write the value onto the coupon, coupons that double or triple but only in certain situations, daily coupons, weekly coupons, expired coupons that the customer tries to force on you…coupons are an extreme pain in the rear.
And “stacking” was the absolute worst. At our supermarket, we were not allowed to scan in coupons on any item which would mean that the customer received money back for buying the item–in other words, if you had 40 cent coupon from one newspaper and a 50 cent coupon from another paper and your item was 80 cents, you wouldn’t be getting 10 cents back. You’d get the item for free, but we’d have to code in one of the coupons as 10 cents less than it actually was. The reaction of the customer was always the same–“Hey, that coupon was for 50 cents, why did you key it in as 40 cents?” I think that brought the manager down more often than anything (including the question of “Why can’t I buy cigarettes with food stamps?”) It was an enormous pain in the butt, it held up the line for ages, and it caused a lot of bad will. Eventually our supermarket chain decided that you could have one coupon per item, and that was that.
I’ve only seen about five minutes of the show (honestly couldn’t stand it, even as a trainwreck) but I saw enough of it to see that they were allowing coupon stacking. I don’t think most places have allowed coupon stacking in 20 years.
King Soopers here in Denver doubles coupons all the time if you use your loyalty card–within limits. The two major limits are that they only double up to $1.00 (if your coupon is for 75 cents, you get another 25 cents), and it has to be a manufacturers coupon, like what you cut out of the inserts in the Sunday paper.
I’ve found coupons that I can use to be very rare any more. As a single guy, it’s pretty useless for me to use coupons that require me to buy two or three of something perishable that I won’t eat up in time, and a lot of the coupons are for stuff I wouldn’t buy in a million years.
Many customers can’t read coupons either. They buy Ragu and have a coupon for Prego. They have a coupon for “NEW Chocolate Covered Batwings” and they try to use it for regular old Batwings. The coupon requires you to buy three and they only buy 1. On and on. The lines get tied up, and often the stores just give the customer what they want to keep the lines moving. The limit is 20 coupons a day but sometimes the customer just gets another store reward card and goes through the line again later in the same day. Why obey the rules when you can get around them?
As someone who manages in a grocery store, I’d recommend couponing now. All the cheaters are about to make the rules much more strict.
Back in the mid-1980s, there was a period where a lot of grocery chains were advertising doubling (and occasional tripling) of coupons, and that was what seemed to get the initial wave of extreme couponing off the ground back then. People could and did walk out of the grocery with (slightly) more money than they came in with, if they were managing their coupons well, and using them to their best advantage in conjunction with specials, triple coupon days, and the like. You had to be obsessed, but you could do it.
But that led to some of the common store policies that are still generally in place, like not allowing a coupon to reduce the price of an item to less than zero, allowing only one coupon per purchased item (and vice versa), limiting the total number of coupons on one visit to the store, etc. Triple coupon days disappeared, and even doubling of coupons became a lot rarer.
As posters here have noted, you can save a decent chunk of change on your grocery bill with coupons if you are adept with this sort of thing. But the time is long gone when you could get a cartful of groceries for free, or close to it.
I watched one episode where a guy bought like 80 jars of mustard. My own family uses about 2 jars per year, but I am willing to give the guy the benefit of really liking mustard and say he goes through 4 jars per year. He is, at some point, still going to be eating 20 year old mustard. Me, I would rather spend a few extra dollars and not have to do that.
DH does this. The good part is he won’t do it all in one fell swoop, taking up 5 carts. He splits his visits based on which store’s coupons he has. So he doesn’t hold up the line. Many times he will come home and show me something, and ask, “Do you know how much this was? Free!” His latest coup was 25 cent Voskos yogurt. When he got there, nothing was left except peach and vanilla. He cleared the rest of the stock.
We do eat what he buys, there is no stockpiling going on, although we have a considerable amount of soup cans. We save at least 50%.
The people you see featured, with fully-stocked grocery stores in their homes, ARE INDEED hoarders.
They ALL have a story about some incident that triggered the whole process.
One of the hoarding shows featured an extreme couponer. The organizer went through her precious stockpile (which she had arranged oh-so-perfectly) and showed her how much was out of date or completely unidentifiable. Her freezers were an abomination. Like all hoarders, she had a very difficult time letting go, typically holding up a single item and saying, “But SOMEBODY could USE this.”
The worst extreme couponer, though, was the woman who saved money so her family could move halfway across the country…and they had to rent a separate trailer to haul her stockpile. I was almost to the point of banging my head against something hard at the idea she was paying rental fees and gas and tolls and wear and tear to transport bottled water and boxed macaroni and cheese.
This is not all staged, it’s not all hoarding, and it is not all in distant years past.
My daughter is 5 and when she was an infant, I had $0.50 off 2 coupons for the little Gerber jars of food. Target, as it happens, had them 2-for-$0.49. I bought them all and then made sure to pick up some other non-sale/couponed item, to make sure I didn’t end up with a negative balance.
Another Target-related deal: Pantene had a $1 off each bottle coupon. Target had a buy-2, get-1 free. They also had them either $1 each or $1.50 each, I don’t recall. They also had a buy-3, get a $5 Target card. Long story short, over the course of a week, I picked up north of 80 bottles of shampoo and conditioner for free, and pocketed $130 or so in Target cards. Yes, I had to buy a plastic bin to put them in, but we’ve been using the stuff for the last 3-4 years and I’d consider it well worth it.
The only person I know who is really into this sort of couponing is an older widow who lives alone and wouldn’t seem to need to buy in quantity.
But she mostly doesn’t even bring her treasures into her house: she swings by the local food pantry and drops off all of it. 0r at least all but one or two of some items.
The people there love her madly.
It’s her way of ‘volunteering.’ As she says, she has more time than money, so why donate $10 to the charity, when she can donate over a hundred dollars worth of stuff for the same money?
More power to her, I say.
BTW, before meeting her I had no idea that food pantries took anything but, er, food, but apparently they are thrilled to get cleaning supplies, pet food, toiletries, and MOST especially diapers and diaper wipes and such.