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PJ, I’ve followed your couponing sagas, here and have just a couple of questions.

Where are you putting everything? Do you have kids? If you are just a couple, how long does it take you to go through extreme stores of items?

I have 2 chest freezers and a large freezer in my fridge. We just got our venison in and I had to ask a fiend to take some large roasts until next week, when I will have more room. I bake and my favorite recipe makes 3 loaves of bread. If I can’t freeze two of them, it makes no sense to make that recipe and to bake one loaf of bread always seems like too much to go through if time is at a premium. If I make soup, it also takes up space and a gallon of homemade soup will last us for a couple of months, if frozen.

I have a 12’ closet filled, 2 chests of storage drawers in another room filled and about all I can spare of space for extra TP/towels/cooking oil and foil, filled. My pantry is stuffed as I move items from storage to pantry and then replenish as I make room.

I looked at the tens of thousands of dollars the people on the show had in their garages/spare rooms and I didn’t even see large families. I always donate to food drives and I have given 2 weeks worth of food at a time, organized into 6-8 serving meals, to people I knew were facing hard times and were not eligible for food stamps. Even after depleting stores when my husband was out of work, I think we had enough left of most items for a couple of months.

As for commercial pizzas, I buy them at 10/$10 and they last us 2-3 months. I use them, with add-ons,on nights when my husband has late appointments and eat late with little time to cook. A tube of Colgate toothpaste is $3 or so and lasts us months. I just bought 2 tubes for $3 and, if I had gone with Aim, I could have gotten them for $2.

My DIL coupons and either trades for them online or gets extra Sunday papers. She has 6-8 bottles of detergent in her laundry room at all times, 12 bottles of shampoo, every cupboard stuffed and some of her food storage is 2 years out date. Last year, I spent some time reading at the Grocery Game and some women were taking the wallboard out of their homes in order to use the interior wall space between the studs as storage space. I start to wonder how much of this is almost an addiction, like gambling. It just seems excessive. How many bottles of EVOO does one need to have on hand, especially when people seem to go out on foraging trips with their coupons 2x-3x a week to make sure they get every last deal possible?

>>>>> "I spent some time reading at the Grocery Game and some women were taking the wallboard out of their homes in order to use the interior wall space between the studs as storage space. I start to wonder how much of this is almost an addiction, like gambling. It just seems excessive. How many bottles of EVOO does one need to have on hand, especially when people seem to go out on foraging trips with their coupons 2x-3x a week to make sure they get every last deal possible?" <<<<

Do you have a URL for that "Grocery Game" site you referred to?

I've read that the definition of being a clinical "real" 'hoarder' is that you save stuff that you'll NEVER use, that you save stuff that is absolutely without any value whatsoever, AND that your stuff interferes severely with the normal use of ALL the rooms in your home, for the purpose for which they were designed.

Many of the couponing sites I read in the 1990s had lots of members who once a year would donate all their excess Freebies to either homeless or battered women's shelters or to local food shelves.

I'd say that anyone who removes the drywall in order to make more room for storage.... needs to watch the cable tv series, HOARDERS: Buried Alive. It's either on A&E or on TLC - there are 2 different programs which focus on hoarders, and plenty of them save HUGE stores of food gone bad,bad,bad.