Extreme Rochester couponer featured on TLC episode
By DANIELLE CURTIS
dcurtis@fosters.com
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ROCHESTER — Katherine Cauley and her family could survive for weeks without leaving their Alice Lane home. They could clean up hundreds of spills without a trip to the grocery store, and could each chew one piece of gum a day for nearly three years without running out.
Katherine, 31, a mother of two young children who works full time for the government, is not a hoarder, however — she's an extreme couponer, buying hundreds of dollars worth of food for mere pennies. And her hobby, which she has only been doing for about a year and a half, scored her and her husband, Tom, 47, a spot on Wednesday night's episode of TLC's Extreme Couponing.
The television show follows extreme couponers, who at times spend hours each week researching and cutting coupons to save hundreds of dollars. On Wednesday's episode, for example, which was filmed in August at the Market Basket in Lee, Katherine was able to bring an $882 bill down to only $18 with the help of more than 600 coupons.
Katherine was first introduced to couponing over a year ago by a friend who was buying many paper towels with a coupon. Her friend shared the coupon and Katherine started her own paper towel collection — a collection that has since grown to contain more than 600 packages of paper towels that earned her the nickname "Princess of Paper Products" on Extreme Couponing.
Since then, she said, her friend showed her where to find the best coupons and her hobby grew.
Now, Katherine said that before she goes on a big shopping trip she spends up to 10 hours finding and cutting coupons, scouting out sales at various grocery stores, preordering items she wants in bulk to ensure they will be in stock at the store.
That time is nothing compared to the time it took to actually film the show, however, Katherine said, adding they were in the grocery store from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. just to film their shopping trip.
| John Huff/Staff photographer Katherine Cauley and her daughter Hallie, 5 in the family storage room at their home in Rochester. The Cauleys were featured on The Learning Channel's Extreme Couponing TV show recently. |
Since her hobby has grown, Katherine says she gets most of her coupons from coupon-clipping websites, newspaper inserts, and even Facebook, which she said is where she often finds some of the best deals.
"It's an addiction," Katherine said, laughing. "It keeps me off the streets and in the stores."
What she brings home from those stores goes into her stock pile in the basement, better known as "Our Family Grocery Store," which contains nearly $30,000 worth of food that Tom said the family probably spent only $500 on.
"It's crazy," he said Thursday, standing in the basement room surrounded by floor to ceiling shelves of food.
It was a photo of this stockpile Katherine posted on TLC's Facebook page that resulted in the Cauley family getting a spot on the network's couponing program.
"The next day the producer of the show emailed me," Katherine said, saying she was shocked by the response. "I thought my stockpile was good, but I didn't think it was as big as others I saw on TV."
Standing inside the Cauley family's "grocery store," however, it's no surprise they were chosen for the Extreme Couponing show.
The four-walled room is packed with more than 200 boxes of pasta, 60 boxes of tissues, 400 boxes of dryer sheets, 60 bottles of body wash, hundreds of packs of gum and bottled water, shelves upon shelves of laundry detergent, and enough juice boxes to last her 6-year-old daughter Hallie and 21⁄2-year-old son Bryce until middle school.
Large bags of candy hang from the shelves and a large freezer holds everything from frozen french fries and vegetables to half gallons of ice cream.
Still, the family said they do not believe Katherine's hobby is wasteful — a view they say is a common misconception.
| John Huff/Staff photographer Hallie Cauley, 5, looks through the juice inventory in her families basement storage room. The Cauleys were featured on The Learning Channel's Extreme Couponing TV show recently. |
According to Tom, who organizes the food in the stock pile, the family only buys products with no or very far off expiration dates, and with the amount of entertaining they do for their large families, the stockpile gets diminished faster than some might think. When food is getting close to expiring and the family will not be able to use it in time, Tom said, they donate it to local food pantries.
Still, Tom said even the basement grocery store is getting overcrowded with items from Katherine's shopping trips, and the family agreed that the trip filmed for the show would be Katherine's last big couponing excursion for six months.
Whether it was actually possible, however, is another matter.
"I plead the fifth on that one," Katherine said laughing before admitting she had already broken that deal. "I think I went back two days after filming to get more gum."
Katherine said even her friends and family were shocked to see the extent of her family's stockpile, saying while most of them knew she enjoyed couponing, they did not realize just how big of a collection of groceries the family had in the house.
| John Huff/Staff photographer The family storage room at the Cauleys home in Rochester is packed with the god deals she is able to secure with her extreme couponing. They were featured on The Learning Channel's Extreme Couponing TV show recently. |
The family's appearance on the show is also bringing more attention from strangers and the media, Katherine said. By the end of the show Wednesday night, Katherine said, she had 30 friend requests on Facebook and had people writing all over her wall for couponing tips.
Thursday morning, she was being interviewed for a live radio show out of New Jersey. The producer of the show, she said, told her this was only the beginning.
"I'm not sure if I'm ready for it," she said of the increased attention the show has brought to her family. "It's hard explaining to the kids that this is not normal, not everyone has a grocery store in their basement."
Still, Katherine said she cannot imagine a time when she stops extreme couponing.
"As long as the coupons and sales are out there, why not?" she said.
To view clips of Wednesday night's episode of Extreme Couponing featuring the Cauley family, visit the TLC website.
1 comment:
It is CRAZY!!!
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