Not So Extreme Couponing

I've been watching the new television show on TLC called Extreme Couponing. It shows shoppers who are consumed with clipping coupons and come out of the grocery store with something like $968 worth of groceries for $7.43. My first instinct was to think that I would like to try to save that much money. After I put some thought into it I decided that kind of couponing is just not for me. First of all the people on the show spend 30-40 hours a week clipping coupons, organizing, and studying weekly ads. That's like a full time job. Second, they have stockpiles of food and merchandise that takes up quite a bit of room. That's fine, but much of it seems to be things that they will never use (like 800 tubes of toothpaste or 400 sticks of deodorant or 52 bottles of mustard), but they are proud to have it because it was free. And they have to pay for the coupons, either through purchasing a newspaper or ordering them from a coupon web site. Actually I've seen some of them who dumpster dive to find coupons! Finally, most of them have spent years learning all of the tricks to getting so many free items.
So I'm just not willing to go that extreme. I don't have the time or the energy or the interest. But it has inspired me to work a little bit harder at finding coupons, organizing them, and planning to get the best use of them. I probably spent about an hour clipping and printing coupons for my trip to Target today and for my Kroger trip later this week and then matching them to things that were on sale. I ended up saving about $20 out of $100 today, so I thought that was pretty good. I'm going to be content to be a not-so-extreme couponer.