So there’s been a lot in the news over the past several months about people who are using coupons and “smart shopping” to save money on the grocery bills.

As great as this sounds, I almost always discover what these people are doing is–for me–completely unreasonable.

Why do I say this? Because in every interview these people talk about how they saved $78 by getting twenty packages of toilet paper for $10.

OK. Great that you saved that much money, but where do you store twenty packages of toilet paper and fifty bottles of shampoo and eighty boxes of mac and cheese? And how do you manage to use all that stuff before it goes bad?

Here are the food cabinets in the kitchen. Notice I have those horrible cabinets with wasted space in the corners. (Yes, the cabinets are a mess. Don’t remind me. Grandmom gets the lower shelves, since she can’t reach above them. Makes it hard for me to organize, since I can’t easily reach things on the top shelves.

So no room in here for extra food. Rest of the upstairs? No space. Living room, bedrooms, bath, and one very small closet for both my clothes and Michael’s clothes.

How about the basement then?

That’s even worse.

Here are the storage shelves in the basement. Notice anything? They’re full. And there’s not an inch of space for other shelves. (Rest of the basement is just as bad if not worse.)

So storing extra stuff is not even within the realm of possibility. (I can’t even buy paper towels in bundles larger than two.)

Then there’s the other trick they use, which is finding out what’s on sale and then buying what’s on sale from different stores.

I go to two grocery stores every week. Saturday morning I go to Target and Giant Eagle, and then Sunday to Kroger’s with Grandmom (I don’t like Kroger’s but they have milk from VA in glass returnable bottles.)

You know what? That’s already more time than I like to spend shopping. You want me to add going through the local paper (which I don’t buy because it SUCKS) looking for what’s on sale in every store around town? Are you kidding?

Perhaps if I didn’t work full time that might not sound so horrific, but I’d much rather spend more time at home relaxing, and less time shopping. (Laundry is bad enough.)

Now I’ll admit I could certainly save money by using the coupons they give me at the store when I check out, if it’s for something I’d buy anyway. Except that not only do we not remember to take those coupons back to the store with us, most weeks I don’t remember to make a shopping list before I leave the house.

So is coupon clipping worth it? And if so, how much can one put into it before you’re spending more time shopping than relaxing?