Of
course, the immutable laws of reality television decree that even
positive behavior must be exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. Parsimony
may be the new spendy, but that doesn't mean that the national obsession
with acquiring has diminished. Many of the bargain hunters featured on
TLC's Extreme Couponing come off like hoarders on a budget. There's
surely nothing normal or healthy about buying thousands of diapers when
you are childless, or sacrificing entire rooms of your house to jars of
tomato sauce and enough tubes of toothpaste to last an average person 40
years. The show features two or three shoppers per episode, following
them as they clip coupons and painstakingly plot a grocery store trip to
add to their already massive stockpiles. Some of them root through
their neighbors' trash and recycling bins in the tireless search for
more savings. They talk about the approaching shopping trip as the
biggest and boldest haul of their careers, in much the way that a career
bank robber might plot his last great heist.
"I'm like
a marksman. Instead of a hunter who's hunting a deer, I'm hunting
deodorant," one extreme couponer triumphantly explained.
It
makes for much more riveting television than you might expect. The show
presents its subjects as an amalgam of circus freak and folk hero, but
it's hard not to be impressed and envious as the savings ring up and
surrounding shoppers and store employees gawk in amazement. The most
intrepid bargain seekers will walk away with an astounding $1,000 worth
of groceries and toiletries, for which they will pay $50 or less.
I
stumbled across Extreme Couponing late one night and, when it ended, I
sprang off my couch, galvanized to immediately embrace a couponing
lifestyle. You see, I recently landed in New York City, a place where a
jar of mayonnaise inexplicably costs $7. While I had no intention of
amassing an enormous stockpile of food and household items as though I
was preparing for the zombie apocalypse, I was sufficiently inspired to
believe that couponing might free me from the city's condiment tyranny. I
flopped back a minute later, deflated, when I realized that I didn't
even know where to start gathering coupons, as we had finally abandoned
our print newspaper subscription as a cost-cutting measure. (I believe
this is what's known as a financial cul-de-sac.)
My
favorite of the recession reality shows is A&E's Storage Wars, which
combines the popular sub-genres of real estate and antiquing into one
uber-addictive series. And real estate doesn't get much lower-end than
repossessed storage units. The show, which just wrapped up its
successful first season, follows a motley crew of treasure hunters who
venture into the least glamorous parts of California—towns with
unrecognizable zip codes that house sprawling, hive-like storage
facilities—to bid on the contents of abandoned units in a series of
(arguably) high stakes auctions. Sometimes the gamblers stumble into a
cache of valuable collections and antiques, other times they walk away
with nothing but piles of junk.