How "Extreme Couponing" has ruined my life

So maybe this title is a little dramatic, but the show "Extreme Couponing" does sincerely make me mad.  Sure, sure...it's cool to watch these men and women get $1000 grocery bills down to $0.42.  But let's identify what we're really watching.

1.  People cheating the system.  Just in the past two days I've seen folks print their limit of internet coupons on their five home computers, steal Sunday papers from the fronts of homes being foreclosed upon because she doesn't think someone lives there anymore, and use coupons intended for one item for another, lower priced, item. 

2.  People can buy lots of crappy food for really cheap.  Is that the goal?  Who doesn't love 20 boxes of cake mix, but who needs that unless you're planning to open a sham of a bakery.  One can only live on pasta and frozen pizza for so long.  Eventually you'll need milk, a chicken breast, and apple.  I'm not the healthiest of eaters, but this show puts a spotlight on how poorly Americans eat. 

3.  Folks on this show dedicate entire wings of their home to storing their stockpile.  Making up numbers here, we can estimate that a garage adds about $25,000 of value to a house.  A typical storage unit is about $50 a month.  It would take you 500 months, or 41.7 years, to get back the amount of money you spent on this portion of your house to store your 450 bottles of laundry detergent.

4.  And who the heck needs 450 bottles of laundry detergent?  Seriously there was one couple with something like 150 sticks of deodorant.  In my humble opinion, this is just organized hoarding.  Even the narrator said something like, "That's enough to last the average adult 70 years."  Many extreme couponers are diligent about donating and I commend them.  But to those who just hang onto everything and continue buying more, there's therapy for that.

So how did this ruin my life?  I recently emailed my local favorite grocery store, asking them for their most recent coupon policy. Suddenly there is a 20 total coupon limit, a limit on the number of duplicate items you can use a coupon for (you can only buy two cans of tuna with two coupons, for example), a doubling policy only on coupons with up to a $0.50 value, blah, blah, blah.  The reigns have been pulled in.  This woman, who used coupons ethically and relied on them to lower her weekly grocery bill is now seriously limited because of those who abused them.  Gee thanks.