"Coupons are my hobby. My baby. I can talk for days about coupons," says Courtney Joiner. The Mechanicsville mother of five uses a couple of 7-inch binders to help her stay organized with her coupons. Credit:
"I do my homework," said Lammey, just one of dozens of so-called "extreme couponers" who hit the Bloom on U.S. 60 every Tuesday, large binders overflowing with coupons.
They've turned couponing into a pseudo-sport that has websites, advice columns and television shows. Their score is tallied in dollars and cents.
More attention has been drawn to the practice of couponing by the television series "Extreme Couponing," which debuted on TLC in April. It follows shoppers whose intense devotion to finding bargains can whittle a $555.44 grocery store bill down to $5.97, to cite one extreme example.
On Tuesdays, the Bloom store, a unit of retailer Food Lion, is packed with a large number of the Richmond area's extreme couponers. The store offers double coupons up to $1.99 per coupon on some Tuesdays – which is a higher limit than most stores.
When combined with sale prices, loyalty card discounts and multiple coupons, the savings can add up. Recently, Lammey spent $29 for groceries that would have cost $162.
"I live at Bloom," said Courtney Joiner, a Mechanicsville mother of five who makes the weekly trek with her two 7-inch binders multiple times each Tuesday because the store has a limit on how many coupons one can use per checkout.
The couponers come in every size, sex, color and socio-economic strata and they travel long distances in search of savings to stores throughout the area, from Kroger and Martin's Food Market to CVS and Target.
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