Stores have admitted they are waiving their usual coupon policy for the show.
SO THE WHOLE THING IS IMPOSSIBLE IN REALITY.
So why does anyone watch the show? You the average coupon user could never do what you see on the show, so what is the point?
It is like having a home reno show in a universe where there are no building codes, which of course you will never be able to do yourself.
I think people are willing to suspend disbelief for the entertainment of watching shopping with coupons. It’s escapist fantasy in its purest form.
The show has also kind of ruined couponing. Retailers and manufacturers have gotten wise to a lot of the tricks used on the show. Granted they may have been wise to those tricks before, but not enough people were really taking advantage for them to worry about it.
I’d argue that it has made couponing more legit. Now those loopholes are gone and people aren’t get paid to get free stuff. Nor is the rare asshole clearing shelves of a product someone might have liked to purchased. And the rare extreme couponers taking up everyone ELSES time in line with the shenagins are probably less common.
I for one am glad the loopholes have been closed. So , even though I think the show is absurd I think it has overall probably done good.
Extreme… couponing? Can’t speak for anyone who’d already heard of it, but I want to see this because… WHAT?
Yeah, thanks. I did actually look at it on youtube before posting. I was answering the OP’s question: I, for one, want to watch it out of disbelief.
We stopped watching because it was just too painful seeing people with such severe emotional and mental illnesses acting like their actions were a good thing. They are simply hoarders a few years before they show up on the hoarding shows.
What? Reality shows aren’t real?
Why didn’t anyone tell me?
I’m gonna stop watching
Not knowing what extreme couponing is, I looked it up on youtube. I still don’t know what it is, for the vid was in a foreign language. Looked pretty nasty. Something to do with investing in toilet paper.
Basically, extreme couponing is coordinating manufacturers’ coupons with store coupons and in-store specials in such a way that you get a lot of stuff for free or for very little. Before all these policy changes, people who were very good at it would walk out with a few hundred dollars worth of stuff for maybe a tenth of that, if not for free. There were coupon exchanges where people could buy and trade coupons online and clubs where people could meet to work out strategies.
The behavior of these people was astonishing. They would, as someone else mentioned, clear whole shelves of product, leaving nothing. They’d tie up a register while the cashier rang up all the stuff, then the coupons, then the arguing over some coupon or another. I got stuck behind one of these winners once and it took about 45 minutes from beginning (I was still shopping at this point) to end.
One good thing that came out of this was that some people really were donating what they couldn’t use to shelters and food banks. Unfortunately, these organizations would frequently find themselves with donations that they couldn’t use. For example, someone donated a metric crapton of (IIRC) frozen foods that the food bank couldn’t store because they don’t usually have frozen foods to give away, and there wasn’t enough to put some in every package anyway. It went home with the staff and volunteers. But it’s bad PR to turn down donations for any reason, and they frequently got a lot of stuff that they could use, so they couldn’t afford to turn this one down. They also had the problem of people donating stuff they obviously bought with extreme couponing strategies, then asking for a receipt for the full retail value of the donation, so they were flirting with the idea of asking for receipts to confirm the dollar value; you’d only be able to claim what you actually paid. But, again, that’s bad PR for the food bank, so that never happened. Fortunately, stores and manufacturers changed their policy so it wasn’t an issue. (FTR, the food bank’s PR person is a friend, so I heard about all of this.)
So these policy changes that mean these tricks no longer work, I assume they’re something like “one coupon per customer” or similar?
This was my problem with the whole thing. The amount of time and effort it took to get these great deals.
If people getting these deals where actual poor people I could live with it. But most poor people don’t have time for these kinda efforts.
So, to me, it looked more like not so poor people with too much time on their hands being cheap asses / borderline theifs.
Pretty much, yeah. Or you can have the in-store special price, or the coupon, but not both. Or (and this is my supermarket’s policy) you can only have x of a certain product at the sale price; any additional will cost the regular price. And they’re more rigid in their enforcement of the terms of coupons and pickier about the ones they’ll accept.
I take it then that there is a TV show for viewers to watch other people collect coupons and stand in line at a grocery using coupons (beats chewing cud, I suppose – I just hope they don’t vote or own guns), while viewers’ time and attention are sold to advertisers, who also issue coupons for their products, so that the viewers will have the opportunity to emulate their TV idols by using coupons when then shop, thus covering the advertisers’ advertising, product and coupon costs and more. Madge really was soaking in it.
I’ve watched some of those home renovation/purchase shows and I wonder what universe they live in. It’s amazing how many couples in their late 20s work as “consultants” and can afford $500,000 dollar homes.
Few of the reality shows have much of a resemblance to reality.
Ice Pilots is real. Sometimes eccenric, but real. http://www.icepilots.com/episode4_6.php
I would watch the hell out of such a show.
There’s a longstanding tradition of ‘reality’ shows not reflecting ‘reality’
House Hunters is often staged. The seekers have already purchased one of the homes and pretending to look at others.
Storage Wars apparently put interesting/valuable items in lockers after purchase
And now extreme couponing misrepresents how much you can get.
There is no more integrity.
If you haven’t seen it already, Renovation Realities on DIY is pretty close. A half hour of a camera crew taping idiots trying to fix up their homes. My two favorite moments were the couple that undid half of their kitchen flooring to remove a piece with a slightly chipped edge in the middle of the room, refloored and then dragged a refrigerator, a stove and cabinets over the floor and the sisters that built a temp wall out of 2x4s and 1[sup]3[/sup]/[sub]4[/sub]" finish nails.