Skip to main content

Are you an extremist?

An article in The Sunday Times draws my attention to a disturbing phenomenon called 'extreme couponing', which has migrated to the UK from America. According to journalist Kevin Dowling, more and more people are attempting to get bulk purchase discounts by spending up to 40 hours a week researching deals online.

The word sad doesn't really do justice to this. 40 hours a week looking for discounts? Perhaps if the coupon extremists went out to work instead of surfing the web, their groceries and household goods might suddenly seem more affordable?

Believe it or not, one of the interviewees flew out to the States for an extreme couponing training course. Presumably the savings she makes quickly recover the cost of her transatlantic plane travel, workshop fee and accommodation costs. After all, if you come back and bulk buy enough Andrex to last you a year, you'll be quids in.

Think I'm joking? Someone from Greenwich in London claims to have bought 'a year's worth of shaving foam, hair wax and skin lotion', along with cereal, cleaning products and so on. Let's hope the warehouse facilities come cheap, eh?

Perhaps I'm missing a trick here and shelling out hundreds of pounds needlessly. But at least I know that when self-respect was being handed out, I didn't settle for 75% off.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...
Post a Comment
Read more