Extreme Couponing Is Fake?

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Extreme Couponing (the TV show) has made hundreds of thousands of people aware of the power of using coupons and the savings that using coupons can bring. The show has created great interest using coupons by consumers that have never used coupons before. That's a great thing. Extreme Couponing, however, has also given many people an unrealistic expectation of what they should expect when they use coupons. It is not realistic to think you are going to buy your weekly groceries for a family of four for less than $10 nor that you will buy hundreds of dollars worth of groceries and walk out of the store having made a profit. Is it possible to use coupons to do such things? The TV show claims that it is. Is it realistic? No!

It is realistic that you can expect to save 30-60% on your grocery bill, depending on the time you spend, your ability to obtain multiple coupons, your storage space (for stockpiling) and your organizational abilties. An hour or two a week (maybe less, if your organized) should be sufficient for you to realize these type of savings. Additionally, although 30-60% savings are very realistic and obtainable, you should not be discouraged if you do not see these savings immediately. You will have to learn the basics of how to coupon, you will have to learn your stores sales cycles, you will have to amass your coupons and you will have to build your stockpile before you will start to see 50% (or greater) savings from using coupons.

The couponers profiled on Extreme Couponing spend an enormous amount of time (some of them more than a full time job) collecting and sorting coupons; planning the shopping trip and storing the items purchased. If you deduct a reasonable hourly wage for the amount of time they spend from their claimed savings, the results are not nearly as spectacular as they first appear. (They also never add in the cost of collecting the additional coupons--such as cost of newspapers, printer ink, gas to drive around hunting discarded papers, etc). Personally, we feel that you have to factor your time into your couponing. Is it really worth it spending 20, 30, 40 hours a week or more to save 90% of your grocery bill if you can save 60% with an hour or two?

Do you really need 200 toothbrushes or 100 bottles of salad dressing.? Do you really need to store grocery items in every nook, cranny and spare room in your house? Do you really want a house that has more groceries than the local mini-market? Amassing the quantities of stock that they show on Extreme Couponing is not realistic. In addition, amassing ridiculous amounts of product is unfair to the rest of the consumers using those stores as these shelf clearers leave few, if any, products for others to buy. This results only in making those stores less likely to cooperate with the normal couponer. If you are going to be a successful couponer, you have to stockpile items when they are at their lowest price (and you have a coupon) but you should only buy enough to last you until the next sales cycle (and maybe just a little more). Those quantities are more than sufficient for the realistic couponer.

If you are driven to duplicate the results you have seen on Extreme Couponing, we wish you the best of luck. For the rest of you, we hope that you will learn a realistic and attainable method of how to coupon on the pages of this site. We use coupons to live a frugal lifestyle. We hope you will find using coupons in a realistic manner your key to frugality also.

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