Last night, my husband and son were gone, so I took the opportunity to do what any woman finding herself alone in the house would do – I watched “Extreme Couponing.”
I am both fascinated and appalled in some instances by this whole concept. I’ve always used coupons, if I have them for something I need. But, on last night’s episode, there was a single mother of two who couldn’t work. She and the kids were living at her parent’s house. Since she couldn’t work (I don’t think she ever gave the reason why), she used her extreme couponing acumen to help buy supplies for her parents.
That is a wonderful concept, but some of the things she said were a bit odd. She said she loved her stockpile – at least I think that is the word the extreme couponers use to refer to their goodies. She said if she had someone in her life, she might choose her stockpile over him. I hope that she was just joking for the camera.
The other thing that struck me as odd was she said they had a lifetime supply of toothpaste. I am certain she got a good deal on it, but does anyone, even someone trying to be green, need a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste on hand?
I know this is helping out a lot of people in these hard economic times, but the shows I like best are the ones where people are getting stuff at an incredible discount with their coupons then giving it to either the local food bank or the people in the neighborhood. I remember one show where someone said if the woman featured in that episode didn’t do her extreme couponing and offer it to people in the neighborhood, they would often go without.
I can imagine the rush these couponers feel when they get $400 worth of groceries for $15. But, often what I see them buy seems like stuff I wouldn’t really purchase. Like 18 cases of bottled fake Kool-Aid. And, I often think to myself “Doesn’t some of this stuff go bad?” I mean if you have 120 boxes of cake mix, those expire in about a year, so do you cook two cakes every week? Which leads me to think that sometimes, extreme couponing can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle.
Still, if I were going to do it, I think I’d buy stuff for as little as I could, then donate most of it to the food bank. To me, that takes all that the green living movement is about into consideration, from thriftiness to social consciousness.