\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
Coming up on Hats For Dogs, we’ll meet Gustav, a man who really loves putting hats on his dogs.<\/p>\n
Upcoming clip is shown:<\/p>\n
GUSTAV<\/p>\n
I love putting hats on my dogs!<\/p>\n
commercial break<\/i><\/p>\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
Today on Hats For Dogs, here’s Gustav, who has dogs, and puts hats on them, and loves it.<\/p>\n
GUSTAV<\/p>\n
I love putting hats on my dogs!<\/p>\n
commercial break<\/i><\/p>\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
We’ve been following Gustav, who loves dogs, and loves hats, and loves one being on the other one.<\/p>\n
Previous clip shown:<\/p>\n
GUSTAV<\/p>\n
I love putting hats on my dogs!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Extreme Couponing<\/em><\/a>, which airs on The Learning Channel, does this, and it’s irritating as hell but I forgive it because I LOVE THIS SHOW SO MUCH. There was a pilot episode of this a couple months ago, showing people collecting coupons, planning shopping trips, buying hundreds of dollars of groceries, and paying just a couple dollars for them.<\/p>\n
Seriously, they showed one woman who bought some $600 worth of groceries, and with all her coupons it came to around six dollars. Another guy spent almost a thousand bucks and after his discount, he only paid around $25.<\/p>\n
And I was like, wow, these people are geniuses. Why the hell aren’t I doing this? It became clear pretty quickly why I’m not doing this, because these people collect coupons like it’s their full-time job. Five or six hours to prepare for a single trip, collecting coupons from papers and the internet, matching the coupons with the best deals to get the biggest discount, creating elaborate spreadsheets to track everything, gaming the system by organizing separate check-outs, all to save every penny possible. That’s just way too much work.<\/p>\n
Then something else started to dawn on me: these people are genuinely insane. They have real mental disorders. Saving 95% on your grocery purchases is great if you went on a huge shopping spree, like, every couple months. But most of these people go shopping four or five times a week. They have entire two-car garages full of food and goods. One woman has hundreds of rolls of paper towels stuffed under her childrens’ beds. One dude on the pilot bought a couple hundred sticks of deodorant. Why? I have to buy deodorant maybe twice a year. My armpits would have to outlive me by a century to need all that.<\/p>\n
A woman on the show last night bought something like 70 jars of mustard. She paid almost nothing for them, but my wife went and checked the expiration date on our mustard, and that stuff is only good for maybe nine months or a year. Even on an all-mustard diet, which few doctors recommend, you could never get through it all.<\/p>\n
So, what seems at first like some really smart shopping and saving quickly becomes a documentary about some seriously insane people buying acres of stuff they don’t need and will never use. Okay, you save a thousand dollars on a shopping trip, but you’re losing money by not having a job because you’re too busy organizing coupons, and you’re also paying rent on rooms stuffed with things that will expire before you get a chance to use them. These people are hoarders, albeit incredibly organized ones.<\/p>\n
There were a couple of couponers who seemed like they were genuinely coming out ahead: a woman with a bunch of kids who probably tear through all that food in a month or so, and a woman who only shops once in a while. The rest of them: tragic, obsessive nuts. It’s fascinating and horrible and I can’t look away. Though, if I did look away, I wouldn’t miss anything because they recap the show every three minutes.<\/p>\n
My wife and I discussed creating our own show, based on our personal habits with coupons, called Half-Assed Couponing.<\/em> It would feature us never really clipping coupons, because we don’t, and on the rare occasions we do clip coupons, we tend to forget to ever bring them to the store. Here’s a sample scene:<\/p>\n
\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
Coming up on Half-Assed Couponing, we meet the Livingstons, who hardly ever clip coupons. But what will happen on today’s shopping trip? Will everything go as planned?<\/p>\n
Upcoming clip is shown:<\/p>\n
ME<\/p>\n
Ah, shit. I forgot to bring the coupon.<\/p>\n
commercial break<\/p>\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
The Livingstons are half-assed about their couponing. Now, they’re at the grocery store, ready to shop.<\/p>\n
ME<\/p>\n
Ah, shit. I forgot to bring the coupon.<\/p>\n
commercial break<\/p>\n
NARRATOR<\/p>\n
We’ve been following the Livingstons, who forgot to bring their coupon, as we already showed you. Twice. Do you remember that, stupid? In case you didn’t, here it is again.<\/p>\n
Previous clip shown:<\/p>\n
ME<\/p>\n
Ah, shit. I forgot to bring the coupon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
See, that’s 22 minutes of entertainment right there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I want to talk about my unabashed love for the television show Extreme Couponing (actually, I sort of don’t because I’m horribly embarrassed about it) but first I need to talk about my unrestrained hatred for the annoying habit some TV shows have of constantly showing you what is coming up next before they go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[607,612],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-television","tag-coupons","tag-reality-shows","section-blog","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}