'Extreme Couponing' Is Here To Prepare You For The Coming Mustard Shortage

TLC

Extreme Couponing participant J'aime Kirlew and her stock pile.

Let me say this first, to those of you who love coupons: To the degree that manipulation of coupons allows people to obtain the things they need at no charge ? which good couponers can do ? it strikes me an eminently sensible, fun, even admirable project. If you're going to the store and you're spending ten bucks instead of $200 on your family because you vigilantly clip coupons out of the paper? More power to you. I would take lessons.

But just be aware that TLC's new show, Extreme Couponing ? which aired as a special in December and starts its regular run tonight ? is more closely related to shows like Hoarders than it is to ordinary shows about thrift.

You will meet a woman who discovers that she can use a double coupon in order to obtain bottles of mustard for 39 cents a bottle. She has obtained 70 newspapers with 70 inserts containing 70 coupons (I dearly hope these people recycle like superfreaks), so she purchases 70 bottles of mustard.

?

She has three kids. If you assume a bottle of mustard holds twelve ounces, she has just purchased 840 ounces of mustard. One fluid ounce is two tablespoons, so let's say she has 1680 tablespoons, or 5040 teaspoons, of mustard. If every single member of her five-person family ate a teaspoon of mustard every single day of their lives, she would not need to buy mustard again for almost three years. If, on average, three members of her family eat mustard three times a week, which seems like it might be a more realistic estimate, she will not need mustard for ten years, at the end of which, remember, she will be eating ten-year-old mustard. (I apologize if there are mathematical errors; feel free to correct me.)

The question, to me, isn't whether ten-year-old mustard is safe; the question is whether, over that ten-year period, you could have perhaps found another coupon allowing you to purchase another haul of mustard that was slightly fresher. And will you really want ten-year-old mustard?

Meanwhile, she has turned over her entire home to the storage of collected groceries. Her family used to have a rec room, but now they don't, because she uses it for couponing. So whatever the value of a rec room is, you'd better add it to the price of the ten-year-old mustard she's going to be eating IN THE YEAR 2021. Her husband's drum set has been shoved against the wall, so he doesn't use it anymore, so whatever the value of his hobby was to him, that will have to be subtracted from the value of something like 90 packages of cold cuts she brings home on a single shopping trip.

The weird thing about this show is that unlike Hoarders, nobody seems to believe this has even the potential to be problematic, and the show makes no effort to analyze the behavior at all. One woman demonstrates that every room in her home has been taken over by shelving, and that her kids don't have ordinary kids' rooms with space to store their stuff; they have to shove a few hundred rolls of toilet paper under their beds.

But nobody questions whether that's fair to the kids, or whether making them participate full-time in this stuff is a great idea, or whether they're going to grow up with any sort of healthy relationship to spending when all they know is hoarding consumer goods as if there's going to be an abrupt mustard shortage that will prevent you from ever being able to obtain affordable mustard with another coupon ever again.

There's no analysis of the storage costs, or the newspaper costs, or the fact that people who do this full-time would have to judge the savings against other things they might be able to do, some of which would be jobs that paid money. One woman claims that her family has saved $40,000 in two years, but isn't it possible that with the time they're putting into this hobby, they could have earned $40,000 in two years? I'm not saying there isn't an answer to that question that makes perfect sense, but the show isn't even interested in it.

The other oddity of this habit, to me, is that there's so much emphasis on accumulating huge stockpiles of stuff, but there's no indication that it will ever lead to not shopping. The stockpile of food, after all, is only worth money if you stop shopping for these items eventually and eat (or wash with, or deodorize your armpits or brush your teeth with) your stockpile. If you're doing that, then in theory, your stockpile should grow to a certain point and then stop growing, or else you're accumulating more than you're using on every shopping trip forever.

So as these women talk about having to build more and more shelving and take up more and more of the space in their homes with what they've collected, it's hard to understand when the payoff is supposed to come, unless it's genuinely the apocalypse or an alien invasion, in which case, admittedly, this lady is going to be the only person in her neighborhood who still has cereal.

As I chatted about this with people on Twitter, I heard from a few who say that they do use some of these techniques to get free stuff. But they all have limits; they do it as long as it's fun and actually saves money and makes sense. But the show is just making these folks into freaks, noting not the fun, inventive parts of this behavior, but the sheer "extreeeeeeme" nature of it; they're highlighting what's senseless about it without demonstrating how it can be made sensible. Regular folks really do this kind of thing to save money, but they do it with a kind of balancing that you're not going to find among the mustard hoard.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/06/135176315/extreme-couponing-is-here-to-prepare-you-for-the-coming-mustard-shortage?ft=1&f=1008

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