Hoarders With OCD

Jeannie has been watching Extreme Couponing on Netflix. I can’t help but watch in disgust.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s pretty impressive to watch the shoppers walk out of the store with a bunch of things and pay virtually nothing, but it’s on the verge of sick. The people who spend upwards of sixty hours a week strategizing their coupons and stockpiles can only be described as hoarders with OCD. What do you do with hundreds of tubes of toothpaste? What do you do with twenty bottles of antacid? How can you eat one hundred boxes of cereal? They’ll expire before you even get to use them.

I can empathize with the people who fell into couponing because of financial need, but I just can’t imagine a diet full of processed foods. If you have seen the show, you’ll notice that the majority of the people featured are overweight. The rest feature shameless coupon bloggers hoping to drive traffic to their websites.

Each episode is formula driven, starting off with a profile of the couponer. Then they show their existing stockpile and review their strategy. It all culminates in a dramatic run to the store, where their (sometimes five to six hours long) visit gets whittled down to a few minutes. They show the couponers at the cash register with their cartloads of items, faking tension with coupon issues (even though the couponers already know what their outcome with be), and finish in victorious savings.

Before you start thinking about a crazy couponing strategy of your own, just know that all of the couponers featured live in areas where stores still honor double and triple coupons. If you live in Southern California, that just doesn’t exist anymore. You can probably save a lot of money by couponing, but you won’t walk out of the store with $1,000 in merchandise for less than $20 like you see on the show.