It’s a story about grit, and determination. It’s a story about sacrifice and success. It’s a story about America and…coupons.
This is the story of extreme couponers Cathy Yoder, mother of seven, and Monica Knight, mother of two. These women, in their 30s, have experienced economic hardship during the past few grueling years coming out of the recession—especially Cathy. With $40,000 in credit card debt, a new child, and a job loss hobbling her financially, she was living on the razor’s edge...until she got into extreme couponing.
Yes, indeed: out of sheer desperation, Yoder (known to her public by her first name, Cathy) turned to couponing. She fell in with the couponing crowd, which was only a gateway for her ascent into extreme couponing. She began her extreme couponing career in order to feed her family, but you have to imagine that she continued after a certain point out of sheer love of the art—not to mention the national attention she was already starting to receive. She later teamed up and through dedication and drive, her family learned how to shave thousands of dollars off of their annual grocery shopping budget.
The fact is that most Americans' grocery-budget composes itself on auto-pilot, defaulting one way or the other due to our appetites and impulses. We go to the grocery store and we sort of free-associate our way up and down the aisles, picking up things on our list but also coming up with new ideas of what we’d like on the spot.
So depending on your palette and your level of self-awareness, you are likely to end up allotting more money to groceries than you otherwise would if you processed your buying decisions with discipline and critical distance. And this is exactly what the art of Extreme Couponing consists of.
It rejects the lackadaisical way of life mindlessly accepted by most Americans in favor of a stringent, new ascetism—a kind of budgetary austerity and cleverness that rarely manifests anywhere other than in the accounting offices of major corporations. The numbers, prices, and values of food get fuzzy when these ladies start getting creative.
At least, that is to say, Extreme Couponing was sort of austere before it became a reality television show.
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