Getting stuck behind an 'extreme couponer' must be the most annoying this in the world!

[toots111]

I'm at home today and watching some terrible TV on TLC. First time I've ever seen Extreme Couponing. These people are insane. I'm all for saving money but who needs 136 tubs of frozen yoghurt! And to get stuck behind one of them at the checkout, what a nightmare, it must take hours to scan all those coupons!

Thing not this, of course. Brain is rotting from day in front of telly

Oh don't. I'm enthralled by this programme. None of it is EVER anything I'd want.

Sports water, mustard and painkillers... It's sort of obscene.

They gather a crowd with it don't they?

It takes HOURS. Then they need a massive car to get massive tubs of crap in their massive basement.

I like a bargain, but I get embarrassed at ALDI when they have their tokens from the Mirror.

We don't get coupons like that over here . I'd be so up for something like that .
Our coupons are rubbish 10p off this and that

thank you! Im confined to the sofa today with a brain turned to mush with painkillers, so this is the sort of junk I need!

YANBU. I hate getting stuck at the checkout whilst the person in front of me leafs through their coupons, checks whether they've got the goods in question, peers suspiciously at their coupons, hands them over, checkout person looks at the coupon, tries to scan it in, fails, peers at the teeny tiny numbers and tries to key them in, fails, tells the customer, customer peers at it again, asks checkout person to try again, he does so two or three times, they have a long discussion about it ....

Yes, all of that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Once I eventually managed to get through the checkout, I needed to go to the helpdesk. When I got there, who should be there but Coupon Woman going through the whole saga again. I wouldn't mind, but I gathered the saving involved was only around 10p: I was heavily tempted just to give her the 10p if I thought it would have resolved the issue.

There was an offer not so long ago where you could get some sort of frozen pizza for about 50 pence each and there was a woman on some kind of bargain hunting programme who had bought about a hundred of them.

She had an entire chest freezer full of frozen pizza. I don't know if when she planned to eat them.

I tried it once and got that much hassle trying to redeem the coupon I never bothered again. It's not like it was even my favourite type of frozen pizza.

I think some of the extreme couponers donate the goods to charity, but it seems to be totally bonkers to buy a hundred of an item that you're never going to eat, even if it is very very cheap.

I used coupons a lot in the states, but to be fair, anyone that I knew (including me) that used a lot of coupons was always very organised about it, so it went very quickly. Using all those coupons allowed me to buy a lot of extra food at little to no cost, which I was then able to donate to the local food shelter. Definitely worth the effort IMO.

I don't normally advocate copying the US. But, you need to take your telly out into the garden and shoot it.

I've seen an episode of that where the 'buyer' got literally EVERYTHING that he could possibly get for free then just donated it to his local homeless shelter/charity, it was useful toiletry type items too. I thought that was great! Wish we had better coupons in the UK!

I rarely do the coupon thing but I have been known to pay for my Christmas food shop using Luncheon Vouchers on Christmas Eve morning That goes down a bundle as you can imagine.

They must also have a very well thought out storage system when they get home to make sure they eat everything before it goes out of date. Far too complicated for me.

Giving things to shelters is nice, but no one on today's show was doing that, just buying all the frozen yoghurt in a shop so that when the end of days comes they won't be without cold dairy products.

what a crap party. Wheres the beer?

Supermarket checkouts in California seem to take FOREVER. They can't get hang of self-checkout machines either, ime. There's just a whole 'This is fine to waste my life on' perspective. Yet they also have very little online grocery shopping. Argh.

DH's BIL does this. He also stocks up when there are special offers. DH had to go with him once for washing powder. He bought something like 20 enormous boxes. There was a limit to how many he could buy in a single shop so he travelled to 4 or 5 different supermarkets to get the offer.
Surely the money spent on petrol negates the 'gain' from the offer?! He gave DH two of the boxes. This was two years ago. We are still halfway through the second box...
I don't see the point buying loads of shit and never using it. I don't see how you're saving money if you never use it! His attic is full of boxes of whiskey, he can't resist any offer on any whiskey! Even if it's 5p off he'll buy a whole crate. He also has a cellar that is full of 'offers'. I stayed over and was asked what I wanted for breakfast. I said did they have porridge? DH disappeared and found a box. I peered past him and there were at least five other boxes in the cupboard. No one in that house ever eats porridge, maybe once a year? Oh but because it was on offer BIL was saving money! He should donate half his crap to a food bank ffs.
He's a tight fucker tbh.

Surely you wouldn't go behind them when you saw the 7 full trolleys though?

I would love to do an extreme coupon ony challenge for the food bank. I would enjoy making a big supermarket give a couple of hundred quid of food away effectively - even if it was 50 things the same it wouldn't matter.

My Granny used to save coupons and send them to me. The vast majority were for really random items that I didn't want anyway (and neither, I suppose, did she, hence passing the coupons to me!)

I used to thank her nicely and bin most of them.

Bless her!

Scan & Shop is the way forward, never stuck behind a slow git again!!

I saw one once where a man was stock piling nappies. He hoped one day in the future to meet a woman, marry and have kids, so he was buying up in advance.

How many women would be tempted by a man with a basement full of nappies?

When l lived in the US, l was a q-pon Queen!
It is accepted there,and worth it. I easily shaved $60 dollars off a weekly shop.
I knew all the rules.
How to combine with store sales, to get free items....
Here? No way.
I don't want to piss about with 25p off cornflakes.

When I worked on a checkout in a big supermarket we went through a phase of accepting every other supermarket's coupons. That was nice, every bugger had a fistful of crumpled paper.

The funniest cheapskate though was a man who worked out that if he just purchased a single mushroom, it would come out at 2 or 3 cents which would be rounded down to 0. Which meant that we had to give him his mushroom for free. He would then repeat the process. Eventually he got kicked out by security but he was at it for an hour or so before he got caught.

I thought this was about me in boots earlier for a moment. I had my parenting club vouchers come through along with a few pampers vouchers and effectively got 2 baskets full of baby products for a couple of quid, the shop should have come to over £40. There was a queue and I did feel bad when my vouchers wouldn't scan, but when money is tight you have to take what you can!

When it comes to baby and household stuff it's definitely worth stockpiling if you have vouchers. I can't do it with food though as my freezer is tiny and full of batch cooked meals from my last makro meat shop.

The episode I watched was a family of 9 where the dad had been made redundant. I didnt see the end but she said they were using the US equivilent of food banks before she started couponing,but now they dont have to. They had a huge basement of very well organised shelves and a special room sized cupboard for the snacks and sweets which were locked up and kids were allowed in once a week and allowed to take 7 items (or something like that)
She would also do a big shop for a the church lunch on sundays. I dont see anything wrong with it. She was obviously very organised woman who had big folders of coupons.

I don't get the need to have $00,000's 'stock piles', who needs 70 plus boxes of breakfast cereal can you eat them before they go stale. I understand those who then donate their shopping to food banks/churches to help others out.

My mother in law is an extreme couponer!