The All-Consuming Pleasures of 'Extreme Couponing'

The women (and very few men) featured on TLC’s Extreme Couponing, a reality show about bargain-obsessed shoppers, have their own vocabulary. The groceries they purchase en masse at steep discount are “hauls”; once those hauls are stacked neatly in the basement, they become “stockpiles”; the word coupon is always pronounced “kew-pon”; the children being fed from the stockpiles built with these kew-pons are “litters.” For these people, couponing is not a hobby, it’s a 60-hour-a-week commitment, even a way of life.

The show, which just finished its fifth season, is on a continuous loop on TLC. Or you can watch the first season on Netflix in one long, pathetic binge. Each episode follows two different couponers through one grocery store shopping trip during which they try to get as many products for as little money as possible. A 24-year-old “coupon diva” named Rebecca, who has enough potato chips in her stockpile to feed 800 people, says she goes to sleep and wakes up thinking about coupons. She used to be in deep credit-card debt, and her sympathetic boyfriend wonders if couponing “gives her an outlet to shop ’til she drops.” Another couponer, Jessica, says, “Everyone’s reaction to my stockpile is, ‘Oh my god, you’re a hoarder,’ ” but she adds, “When I see all the pretty labels [in my stockpile] facing forward … it makes me happy.” Like other TLC reality shows—Say Yes to the Dress or What Not to Wear—the appeal of Extreme Couponing lies partly in its satisfying predictability: Bride needs a dress, she finds one; woman dresses terribly, she gets a makeover; couponer goes shopping, she pays barely anything.