Extreme Couponing showcases grocery hoarding

Tonight was the premiere episode of yet another reality/documentary series on cable channel TLC (remember when it used to be "The Learning Channel"?) entitled Extreme Couponing. The premise is as simple as it sounds -- a camera crew follows a couple coupon clipping psychos around as they prefer for one mammoth grocery shopping trip. The preparation -- usually scouring seemingly endless stacks of coupons from Sunday newspapers, itemizing their shopping list complete with quantities of each item and even going as far as one woman's compulsion leading her to have a spreadsheet detailing each and every item her favorite grocery store stocks and where the items are located within the store is showcased.

All of this borderline insane preparation leads to the big trip. The two women I saw showcased tonight ended up filling a minimum of four shopping carts each. The quantities of items purchased were either totally impressive of straight up insane. Dozens of packages of cold cuts, dozens of boxes of cereal and even 60-plus bottles of mustard.

Yeah, 60 bottles of mustard. That one sort of jumped off the screen at me. Unless you are literally eating a bowl of mustard for dessert with a meal once a week -- as a family -- there is no conceivable way that a family of five would use that much mustard in a lifetime. During the 8 or so warm months in Minnesota, I tend to grill 4-5 meals a week which means brats, hamburgers or weiners for approximately a third of those meals. Even with that kind of frequency I have only used two bottles of mustard in the past six years. That's where the hoarding aspect of Extreme Couponing began to become obvious to me.

These women put 6-10 hours into just the planning of their grocery shopping trips. Then there's the time spent actually gathering the massive quantities of each item into their train of grocery carts. But the big sticking point for me, personally, is the fact that the checkout process takes between one and two hours. If I did this at the local Cub Foods I'd probably have my tires slashed because the thousands of people waiting to check out would have one less checkout to go through -- for an hour or two. Once they return home, the hoarding aspect again becomes obvious -- they have entire rooms where they store their hauls. Having 2-plus dozen bottles of laundry detergent stockpiled seems ridiculous. Buying 50 or so cups of yogurt at a time is almost wasteful and to the woman who purchased 26 packages of cold cuts -- donate a few of those to your local food shelf.

I applaud anyone who can manage to save 90-99% on their food costs -- and to me doing that once a year would likely give me a raging hard-on because I hate spending money -- but this goes beyond extreme couponing and extreme savings, it comes down to buying massive quantities to prove something to yourself and even show off to those around you. It makes me a little angry to think that even some of the food they purchase may go to waste but this is America, the land of excess, and if a family of five feels the need to come home with five carts of groceries for six bucks, so be it because getting a rain check for another 20 cups of yogurt is definitely a first world problem.