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Since its season premiere a few weeks ago, we've kind of had an eyeball on the TLC's new show Extreme Couponing—which shows normal (okay, maybe not normal-normal) everyday people work the coupon-discount-supermarket system so well that, with careful planning and plenty of Sunday circular clipping, they can knock $1,400 grocery checkout bills down to $40. The thing we've been really weirded out about, however, is how all of the Extreme Coupon-er homes have been chock full of products—we're talking hundreds and hundreds of boxes of things like Cheerios, thousands of rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, hundreds of bottles of shampoo, and, in the above video, thousands of tubes of toothpaste—each one bought for just sales tax (read: free). Sure, saving money is great, but life isn't a nut-gathering squirrel race. Whoever dies with the most stuff doesn't win. And, at the end of the day, who cares if you got those hundred bags of pistachios for free. Who's eating a hundred bags of pistachios?
So, all things considered, we liked last night's episode, which featured a man called Nathan and his 1,000 tubes of free toothpaste. Turns out he decided to stop hoarding supermarket stuff and, instead, made 1,000 care packages for our troops abroad. That, we can get behind.
· Extreme Couponing [Discovery]