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Sparkle (1)
Just typing the word stockpile makes me twitchy so you can imagine how I'm handling the fact that this extreme couponing experiment has turned me into a stockpiler. I have moments when I'm on the verge of hyperventilating. Or when I want to just throw in the towel and say enough already. When TW put a Stuff to Stockpile list on the whiteboard I almost had a heart attack.
TW still teases me about all of those times, when we first got together, and I ranted about how much food was in our pantry. She rolls her eyes at me when I rant about why in the heck we have six cans of tomato paste in our cabinets when she might, maybe, use one can of tomato paste in a month. She just plain ignores me when I tell her we do not need anymore cans of black beans, or that we cannot buy anymore salad dressing until we use up the six bottles we already have. Prince J laughed aloud when I told him he could not have another jar of hoisin sauce until we used up the two we already had.
I've just never seen the point of having overly full cupboards and freezers. Why buy 15 cans of anything when you go to the grocery store every week. It's not as if they'll be out of canned refried beans and if they are, we can just eat something else. Right?
In my experience, particularly when you have teenagers in the house, the more food you have - the more they are going to eat. This was proven by our weekly trips to Sam's Club when we lived in Gainesville and had tons of teens in and out of the house. We weren't buying bulk foods so that we didn't have to shop next week. We were buying bulk foods every darn week because people were eating all of the food!
Yet here I am creating stockpiles of food, even though my early extreme couponing posts (and comments within those posts) have me saying "I don't think I can be a stockpiler." Boy was I wrong.
After reading four books about couponing, watching numerous videos about couponing, and reading blog post and forum post after blog post and forum post about couponing, I've finally wrapped my head around the idea that stockpiling is good. Or it can be good if you're stockpiling food (and paper products and health & beauty items) at their lowest possible cost. By stockpiling when prices are low and you have coupons that bring those low prices even lower, you avoid having to buy foods that you need when the prices are high. That's smart shopping, not stockpiling for the sake of stockpiling or stockpiling in order to over-feed your family.
I get it now. I totally get it.
I have six jars of pasta sauce in my cabinets, all purchased at less than $.75 a jar. This means that we won't have to buy jar pasta sauce again for quite sometime - unless there's a big sale and we have the coupons to bring that cost even lower.
We have ten microwaveable lunch meals in the house, all purchased at 75% of the normal price and that's enough to last us a full year. Now there's no need to buy those microwaveable lunch meals again until the fall, and even then we can hold out until there's another big sale - and we have plenty of time to collect coupons that will help us bring down the cost even more.
There are eight boxes of whole grain or low carb pasta in the cabinet, all purchased for $.50 a box (or less). There are six boxes of cereal in the cabinets, all purchased for less than $1.50 a box. We won't be buying either past or cereal for quite some time, unless we can get it for that price - or lower.
Our freezer is full of meat, all purchased at a significantly lower cost than the meat we were buying week over week last year - because we never selected meat based on price (or used coupons for meat purchases), we always just bought whatever we had decided to put on the menu for that week.
That's the art of stockpiling. That's the art of extreme couponing.
It isn't about buying what you need this week, with coupons. It isn't about filling carts with
