Extreme couponing is nuts!!

I've been sucked into watching the "Extreme Couponing" show a few times which, by the way, usually is on before or after one of those hoarding shows. Most of the people featured started couponing after some sort of financial distress (Thank you, recession!). They go buy hundreds of dollars worth of groceries and pay eight bucks for it. After seeing a few of these shows, all sorts of questions pop in my head. Usually, they have a basement or garage full of these groceries and some have shelf units scattered throughout the house in every available spot. It kind of looks like the hoarding shows, only neater and cleaner. Why would you need 123 bottles of mustard? The first indicator of erratic behavior is the lengths they go to in getting the coupons. Sitting around the table clipping coupons is one thing, but digging through dumpsters or getting the leftover Sunday paper inserts from the newspaper office is extreme. Some actually pay to have boxes of coupons shipped to them from companies who specialize in collecting them. It seems that the average time spent each week accumulating these coupons is 35 to 40 hours. Maybe having a job would be better use of their time. 400 bottles of Wisk in your closet won't pay the electric bill unless you sell them on Craigslist! Couponers take advantage of stores doubling and tripling coupons to get the item cost down to near nothing. What irritates me is that they will clear a shelf of an item on sale whether they need it or not because it works out to being free. I guess it's just too bad for someone else who wanted to buy the sale item. Some of the stuff the cameras show in their houses have expiration dates. How will you eat 100 boxes of cereal before they go bad? One or two of the people featured did take their excess and donate it to food banks. One guy bought a whole pallet of Total cereal on sale. I don't know how he got the store to order it ahead of time. Usually the sale is for whatever they have in stock and when it's gone, that's it. He kept a few boxes and gave the rest to the food bank, but he was one of the few. Most of them keep all they get. The show doesn't really explain whether or not they continue buying a particular item after they just bought 100 of them but that's TV for you. Kind of like Yahoo! news articles. Let's leave out part of the story. Anyway, there has to be an underlying psychological problem driving this. It's more than the thrill of the chase. Since there are hoarding shows adjacent to these shows, when you watch one, you can see the similarities of dysfunction.