This may be Cafe Society territory as my questions are based on a TV show, but I’m more interested in learning about how it all works in the US RE: couponing and discounts.
I’d not seen the show ‘Extreme Couponing’ before, but happened upon it after some lazy channel hopping, and was astounded by some of the figures bandied about. One girl, albeit after about 5 hours of work in organising and clipping coupons from various magazines, was in K-Mart and managed, with over 50 separate transactions that she had pre-planned, to walk out of the store with over $4000 worth of groceries for a little over $100. In some of the individual transactions she was racking up $600+ of goods and paying, with coupons discounted, 63 cents or similar. Weird.
Even weirder was that K-Mart were so accommodating to her and even held the store open a few hours past their normal closing to allow her to complete her planned transactions – I would have thought they would have wanted her out of there ASAP, but I guess with the cameras there things change…
Anyhow, first question – how is that possible? Any coupons that I see (here in the UK) are for, say ‘10% off’ or ‘Save £5 when you spend £20’ types, and most usually cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. Or the maximum you can use would be three in one transaction, or if it’s a straight discounted item, there will be a maximum of ‘6 items per person’ or similar. There’s never going to be a way of stacking offers to the point of walking out of the store with effectively free items.
Second question - Is this common? I’d have to wonder why everyone’s not at it, and then selling on the items at a garage sale or something, as 400 packets of biscuits, or 200 deodorants, or 100 bottles of bleach are not realistically going to be used up by the original buyer.
Third question – anyone an advocate or practitioner of this caper and got any good stories to share? Thanks.
K-Mart stayed open because it’s free publicity for them. They aren’t losing a dime on her binge because all of the coupons are likely issued by the manufacturer, not K-Mart.
As for the procedure, you get the biggest bang for your buck by being able to double your coupons and buying when the item is on sale.
Not common. You have to have time to do all of the clipping and organizing and then the shopping. You usually see it being done by people who don’t work outside the home, who have school-aged kids that can help them. Or a married couple where one lost a job and the jobless one spends all their time organizing and the couple shops together.
Then you need space to store all of that stuff if your goal isn’t to give it away (some people do do this extreme couponing with a goal to donate everything).
You also have to be willing to use the stuff you buy. If you’re loyal to a brand of toilet paper or can’t use just any deodorant, well that stuff is out. If you’re watching your weight or don’t want your kids eating so much sugar there’s a ton of food that’s out.
If you want to re-sell it that’s more of a time sink. How much toothpaste can you pawn off on your friends and neighbors? How long will that take?
It’s not entirely uncommon for people to be aggressive couponers these days, and get good discounts especially on double coupon days, usually in nominal quantities of things they use. But the people who work like you see on TV are not at all common.
Unless you are the Duggars with 19 kids, or you like giving things away, it makes no practical sense to be stockpiling so much crap. The people on this show are more addicted to the thrill of the bargain than anything else.
How are people able to combine coupons? The odd occasion that I come across coupons for products I’d actually buy, there is usually fine print that says one per purchase.
There’s no debate that some people manage to get some amazing deals on a fairly regular basis-- but wasn’t it proven that the show Extreme Couponing (like most ‘reality’ programs) was full of fake content?
You can sometimes get a manufacturer’s coupon and a store coupon for the same item. There’s probably also situations where the store has “buy one, get one free” and if you have 2 manufacturer’s coupons you can buy 2 and use one on each item and that works.
Just to highlight this point: in the U.S., some stores will double or triple the face value of a coupon on certain days. I’ve never heard of this in Canada, so maybe it’s not a U.K. thing either.
In the clip of the show that I caught, the girl was using up to 80 coupons in each purchasing event and getting the vast majority of the items for free with only a token cost at the end (three full carts $600 shop for a total of 11 cents or something) which is far beyond a standard BOGOF offer, even with additional discounts. Even if you left half the stuff sitting in the car-park, or donated it to a shelter, you’re still bound to be massively up on the items you did want to have for yourself.
Maybe the show is faked a bit, perhaps to encourage others to ‘try to beat the system’ and thus spend more than they normally would in their average shop.
One question - do you have to buy the magazines the coupons appear in, or are they all free? She had hundreds of copies of each that she clipped the coupons from.
A lot of the real life extreme couponers either are newspaper delivery people, or they go dumpster diving in places with central recycling collection to get the number of inserts, magazines, etc you need to stockpile to make this work.
I’ve never tried the latter, but manufacturers and store coupons are two separate types of coupons, like you said, and can be combined.
From what I understand, it’s the 2x and 3x coupon days that are the goldmine for getting these crazy types of deals. AFAIK, in the Chicagoland area there’s no such thing as double and triple coupon promotions, so I’ve never seen it in the wild.
Generally, the way that works is that, for example, the manufacturer has a $1 coupon on X, and X normally sells for $1.50, but the store is having a 50% off sale on X, so the couponer buys 50 of these things, gets $0.25 added to her tab each time, and then when s/he buys 50 packets of chili mix at $0.50, BOGO, those are effectively free.
Then they use the $0.50 cent coupon on a double coupon day and get the $1.25 item for $0.25.
The store loves it because it’s free publicity and the manufacturer pays for the coupon. It’s not really all that faked, it’s just that most people don’t want to take the time.
As far as getting the coupons - yea, a lot of these people have something like 50 newspaper descriptions, and they don’t include the cost of those in the ‘final’ price they paid. Or they go around to all their neighbors and ask for/steal their coupon sections. Or they make their kids go dumpster diving at a hotel to get all the newspapers travelers threw away. (I list those in decreasing order of commonality).
If you’re extreme couponing for something to do and donating it all to charity, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to live off it… well, that’s no fresh fruits or veggies, and eating the same thing for a month at a time, which I can’t think is healthy. Sometimes on the show you’ll see them storing their ‘catch’ in their kid’s bedroom or the living room because they ran out of space in the basement or kitchen. Which I find kinda sad.
It’s simple. The stores break their own coupon rules for filming. I’m a couponer and most serious couponers loathe these shows. 99.9% of stores have strict coupon policies, all of which are cast aside when the Extreme Couponers cameras start rolling.
Stores that allow 4 like kind coupons (a limit of 4 .50 cent coupons off product X) per customer will allow 50 of the coupons for the show, allowing the customer being filmed to score 50 of the items instead of 4.
Also, many of the items purchased are unrealistic. 100 mustards anyone? When mustard goes on sale for $1 and you have 100 .50 cent off coupons that are being doubled so you can score 100 free mustards and save $100 on your grocery bill??? Fake nail biting register drama.
You can save some decent money with couponing, but it really isn’t done the way it is shown on the show.
Bingo. I think the stores must also be relaxing rules on coupon stacking as well. I’m a reasonably committed couponer, and I find it next to impossible to save more than, say, 30% off my bill (even allowing for store coupons, doubling, etc.). These coupon opportunities that reduce something to zero are either very rare but being misleadingly presented as commonplace, or they’re wholly contrived for the show.
And the “stockpiles” that these people amass strike me as a type of shopping addiction, an organized form of hoarding.