Television Review ~ Extreme Couponing ~ Miles of Aisles, Endless Opportunities to Save

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Television Review

Extreme Couponing

Miles of Aisles, Endless Opportunities to Save

The neighborhood Gristedes, the local Food Emporium: they’re your enemies. The prices are inflated, the selection is limited. And those aisles! It’s as if they don’t want two perfectly reasonable people to peruse the cookies at the same time. (Um, I mean whole-grain cereals, of course. And fruit.)

“Extreme Couponing,” which begins Wednesday night on TLC, passes for a docu-series on people who are unhealthily committed to savings, but it’s really a revenge fantasy and a heist flick all in one. In each episode ordinary people with laserlike focus and a willingness to spend two hours at the checkout line buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of goods for pennies on the dollar, if that.

Even Goliath is impressed with these Davids: flabbergasted store employees — the ones not doing the item scanning, at least — look on with respect and maybe a little envy.

And yet there’s nothing indulgent about “Extreme Couponing.” Desire isn’t at play here. These shoppers take little apparent pleasure in purchasing or consuming; the thrill is the save. Never on this show will you hear a discussion of the merits of one product over another, about preferring the taste of one pudding to another. In the world of “Extreme Couponing” free always tastes best.

The program exists at the intersection of several recent reality themes — obsessive behavior, hoarding, thrift — all delivered with the punch of a game show. First the number on the register climbs sky high. Then, one doubled coupon at a time, it free falls to single or double digits. It’s never not satisfying.
For a show about saving money, though, poverty is rarely depicted and mentioned. The labor-intensive strategy required for this is mostly a suburban proposition, judging by the supermarkets on the show, which have aisles as wide as freeways, and as liberating; in the 1950s songs would have been written about them.

And then there are the houses the shoppers return to, which run from biggish to big, roomy enough to hold several years’ worth of paper towels and body wash. (In New York these people would have to rent a storage unit for their hauls.)

There are hidden costs: the coupon clipping services that sell in bulk and, of course, the endless hours devoted to planning these scores. It all smacks of a middle-class pursuit.

“I kind of feel like sometimes the walls are just closing in on me,” says Tiffany Ivanovsky in one of Wednesday’s two episodes, though she’s also the shopper with a custom-built shelving unit that rotates canned goods by expiration date.
People sometimes speak of their stockpiles in terms of fear. J’amie Kirlew, who appears in a Wednesday episode, began clipping coupons when her husband lost his job. Nathan Engels, who appears next week, notes: “It’s almost like an insurance policy. You don’t get paid if you lose your job, and your family still has to eat.”

Mr. Engels, a genial Kentucky cartographer and clipping celeb who hosts a series of YouTube videos on the subject, is a potential goldmine. “I’m like a marksman,” he says. “Instead of a hunter who’s hunting a deer, I’m hunting deodorant.”

In a December “Extreme Couponing” preview, he bought more than a thousand boxes of cereal for around $150, then donated them to a food bank. The women watching him check out — of the 10 or so shoppers featured through next week, he’s the only man — appeared to be interested in more than his couponing skills: an afternoon flush of lust at the checkout line.
Mr. Engels learned how to clip coupons from his mother, who shops with him in next week’s episode. At the checkout, as his total drops from about $400 to $6, she can’t help herself, shouting, “You’re a winner!”
Mommmmm!

All of the shoppers here have a psychological impetus for their behavior, though the show only glances at the subtext. In the December special more attention was paid to the pathologies. One woman was shown Dumpster diving for circulars — in clean, paper-only recycling Dumpsters, but still. Moving forward, less time should be devoted to planning and logistics — this is suspenseless television — and more to motivations. There’s a “Hoarders” in here, dying to be redeemed.





By JON CARAMANICA Published: April 5, 2011

[abond0017]

Hmmm. I agree with some things like it being much easier for suburbanites to hard core coupon. I can't stockpile 'cause in my new house here in the city we have NO room, and prices on things are way more than when I lived in a suburb in GA and was able to coupon very successfully. But to say there is a pathology to getting in a clean dumpster to search for what essentially amounts to money...that doesn't make sense.

My favorite quote though...
"I'm hunting deodorant."
Lol!