Obviously there's more to couponing than it seems on the surface. Which is partly why I was so eager to watch the show. It's hard to find how-to advice online, and there is a surprising amount of coyness involved. When people talk about their couponing, you sense they're leaving a lot out of their explanation.
Boy howdy.
If you want it to be worth it, you need a lot of storage space. In order to maximize your time spent per coupon redeemed, you need to buy the maximum allowed amount. If that means having a floor-to-ceiling stack of a three year's supply of toilet paper, then so be it.
I fail at this, because I have a small home with extremely limited storage. If pasta is on sale 10 boxes for $10 I'll only buy two or three, because where the heck am I going to put 10 boxes of pasta?
Stockpiling is inefficient. This is the strange contradiction inherent to top-level couponing.
Stockpiled food takes up space. Space which you are paying for every month, in the form of either rent or a mortgage.
Let's say you have a 1,000 square foot apartment for which you pay $1,000/month in rent. Now take a shelving unit that's three feet long. You're paying $3/month just to store all the food on that shelving unit.
This may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. How long does it take before you eat everything on that shelf? Maybe a year? That's $36 you just paid for that food, above and beyond the cost to buy it.
How much did you save by buying it with coupons? And what else could you be using that space for?
Bad things can happen to stockpiled food. If your house catches fire, or you get mice, or there's an earthquake, or you have to move and you can't afford to ship it across the country, you're out all of the money you paid for that food.
(It's why we keep our money in banks, rather than stuffed under our mattress.)
Liquidity is important. If you have $10,000 tied up in stockpiled food, that's $10,000 you can't spend elsewhere. If you keep that $10,000 in your bank account until it's time to buy food, it gives you the option to do something else with it if an emergency crops up.
Food is a bad investment. This sounds counter-intuitive - after all, everyone needs food! But the resale value of food is basically nil. By stockpiling food, you're making an investment in something which is guaranteed to depreciate.
Your time is valuable. You may not spend 70 hours a week at the coupon game, like the first woman profiled on the show. But you will have to spend some time. Two hours a week? Five? Ten?
Don't be fooled by the talk of savings: anything more than the most casual form of couponing isn't about money. It's a hobby, a game, a way to feel like you're beating them at their own game. And it's a way to feel better than other people, the suckers who pay full price for a pound of pasta.
Photo credit: Flickr/sdc2027