KT: KMart til Midnight and Erin 'Free is Good, who cares what?'
Putting the people on this show's blatantly obvious OCD aside, the episode entitled "KT and Erin" was astounding.
KT was a mom going back to college to play basketball. She pre-ordered over $1700 worth of goods from her local KMart, then goes in and (as the show claims) spends the first eight hours acquiring what appeared to be four not-too-heavily filled carts. Then came the giant pre-orders, roughly five feet high per stack. She goes over on the store's scan limit per order, has to re-calculate for 3 1/2 hours to accomodate this. She and her friend get in roughly 20 transactions before the store--now two hours after closing-- has to shut down due to the register's clocks. She ends up leaving all the pre-ordered goods behind, disappointed she couldn't buy them.
Then you've got Erin, who's looking to put an addition on to her house; 90% of the garage walls are taken up with her grocery hoarding hobby, while her husband has a tiny corner reserved for his fishing pole collection. Her reasoning: "my hobby is free, his isn't".
Her trip to the grocery store apparently centers around buying her latest stack of goods to fill her "needs" and then use the money they save towards the house addition. Her reasoning for groceries is "I don't care what the product is, I don't care what it tastes like; if it's free, I want it". She ends up flipping out on the first transaction which totals $17.65, down from the original $170+ price tag--roughly 90% off. One of her store-issued coupons didn't ring up properly. It's fixed after a few minutes, bringing her total down to less than half of that. She had budgeted only $20 for the entire trip. Five more transactions later and she's one happy camper, with over 248 cans of soda, 20 deodorants and 20 first aid products amongst the haul.
As for Erin, where to begin: free doesn't necessarily mean "good". 15 free bottles of barbecue sauce--laden with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, salt and a host of preservatives is both highly unnecessary, wasteful and frankly just plain nasty. Then there's the soda pop: her daughter, roughly 11-12 years old wasn't exactly the thinnest child (in fact of the three family members--mom, dad and her, she was the widest) is likely to be the main recipient of the drinks, furthering her childhood obesity.
If I got $170 in groceries for only $17, I'd consider that a win--it's not like she can't afford $20 in groceries, seeing as how they are building a house addition and she has a steady job as a health store manager, truly the most ironic detail of this entire chapter.
As for KT and her KMart adventure, I truly pity those employees. Having to stay after hours after they were scheduled to go home to accomodate a woman's obsessive hobby that completely took over her garage--to say nothing of the fact most of it would stay behind as she attended college once more--is absolutely disgusting. Furthermore, it's not as if this woman can't come back in the morning to purchase the rest of the excessive goods--there's no law saying she couldn't.
As many have mentioned on this board, these couponers and their "precious stockpiles" are the epitome of American greed. Another episode featuring Fatima--a grossly overweight woman and her grossly overweight husband using their "coupon savings" to move from the ghetto to Hawaii, along with their hundreds of bottles of sports drinks, Capri Suns, mini-boxes of cereal, sodas, and nine other shopping carts of groceries, whish she shipped home in a rental trailer to eventually ship across the ocean with her.
When you've gone to the lengths to bring not just your posessions, but your groceries with you to move to a tiny island, you've reached a level of greed that is usually reserved for corporations. And of course, don't get me started on the sheer waste of spoiled food, to say nothing of their flagrant disregard for their children's health in what they buy.
Why the people on this show haven't been co-opted into appearing on "My Strange Obesssion" or "Hoarders" is beyond me. They're all smiles and giggles for their pride over commercial goods, but their stockpiles rival that of small mom and pop store shelves.
The largest problem of all is of course TLC shining a spotlight and essentially glorifying these hoarders as something "good" (with the exception of the ones that actually DO use their purchases to help those in need or local food banks). It's redundant to mention that TLC's real network name is a mockery of the initial creation (which incidentally was created by the U.S. government for educational purposes), but it's a travesty that such people are seen as domestic heroes for their selfishness and obsession.