"Extreme Couponing" - Attaining the Impossible

I watched The Learning Channel’s “Extreme Couponing” for the first time last night with great fascination: Women with stacks of little pieces of paper that convert their hundreds of dollars worth of groceries to mere pennies if not free.

Their stories were interesting: Many made ‘extreme couponing’ their stay-at-home jobs, saving their families thousands of dollars a year in lieu of a salary. Others had fallen on hard times (a spouse’s loss of job or seasonal pay) and needed to stretch their food dollars as far as they could to feed their families.

I try to use coupons, but am generally not very successful. I’m famous for clipping them and leaving them at home, or worse yet, bringing them to the store and failing to turn them in at check-out.

Before the kids were born, Jim and I used to have a weekly contest to see who could save the most with coupons. Once we got into the competitive spirit, we were probably saving ten to fifteen dollars a week on a one hundred dollar grocery bill (Jim remains the all-time champion, knocking twenty-two dollars off our grocery tab in one trip).

But these women are true professionals, spending forty to sixty hours a week clipping coupons and scanning websites, pouring over weekly sales inserts and mapping out their grocery trips like third-world expeditions.

These power shoppers then purchase items in volumes that small armies could not use in one year. Called “stockpiling”, these coupon-crazed families build inventories within their homes, and then have the ability to ‘shop’ in their basements and crawlspaces without needing to go to the store. One woman estimated she had three-year’s worth of inventory on hand for her family of five (food, toiletries, paper products and household chemicals).

After watching three episodes back to back, I found myself tempted to give this shopping methodology a try. Armed with scissors and a streamlined grocery list, I applied what I thought I learned in ninety minutes of programming on my last trip to Jewel.

This shopping method was obviously going to take a lot more time and effort than I had put into it, but all was not for naught: After coupons and preferred card savings, I knocked twelve dollars off my final bill, purchasing only the items I knew I needed and not buying things just because I had a coupon.

Over the next few weeks I will dedicate a bit more time and effort to this process and see what happens. Who knows, I might save enough money to purchase a half tank of gas!