The first two episodes of "Extreme Couponing" aired this evening on TLC. Many similarities with the original show which aired in December although I noticed some new bits of interesting information. Specifically "money maker" deals or "making money" was alluded to. For those of you new to couponing that means when you have a coupon so good that it is worth more than the product you are buying. The amount of "overage" aka "moneymaker" aka "mm" is applied toward your other products. That is why you saw the people on today's show able to buy meat, milk, etc. and end up owing hardly anything. One criticism I do have of the show is that for dramatic purposes the people bought HUGE amounts of items on each shopping trip. The Coupon Whisperer prefers not to do that for two reasons:
One is that it makes me uncomfortable to piss off the people behind me on line who have to wait a loooooong time for me to do my couponing deals. The other reason is that if there is an error, it can be a real nightmare if you have a lot of items. Like how would you like to have over a hundred of items rung up only to have the cashier and/or store manager tell you that you can't do that deal. Even if they are in the wrong, the bottom line is that you WASTED your time being rung up only to have that effort go to naught. I much prefer to make several trips with relatively few items (compared to a hundred or more) being rung up.
For example, today The Coupon Whisperer had over $300 worth of items rung up (while spending only around 20 bucks total) but it was done in half a dozen different trips. No deal was nixed by the store today but that is exactly what happened yesterday. A store manager refused to allow my deal to go through. Both her and the cashier were surprised how calmly I took it. Why? Because I knew other stores would have no problem with the deal plus a HUMONGOUS rainstorm had just struck and it was a great excuse not to have my stuff get soaked on the way out to the parking lot.
BTW, that was one thing I liked about this episode of "Extreme Couponing." It showed how stores can complicate deals with new rules or their interpretation of the rules. Did you see where that couple had to call their friends to help them out to divide up their transactions? I hope future episodes of "Extreme Couponing" shows problems caused by store managers. Specifically I am thinking of a WAGS manager who claimed that we couldn't get Register Rewards on any items for which we use coupons. WHAT? If that is the case then his Walgreens is the only one to have such a ridiculous rule. The Coupon Whisperer would love to have the "Extreme Couponing" camera focused on the manager explaining that absurdity while your humble correspondent right there speed dials WAGS HQ to have a nice "chat" about this with the store manager.
Looking forward to future episodes of "Extreme Couponing." It will be interesting to see if they go into more detail on such conflicts. Of course, any show down here would be like "Extreme Couponing" as written by Elmore Leonard. In South Florida we sort of have a more relaxed (and eccentric) lifestyle than most of the outside world.
Well, that was the view of tonight's show by The Coupon Whisperer. What was YOUR impression?
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