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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Anyone getting their emails has known it was coming for a long time. They used up all the good places pretty quickly - they got the return customers and didn't need to re-run coupons. Now it's all weight loss scams, online courses "worth" $2k but sold for $20, and even sex toys lately.

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Exactly this. It stopped being a good way to discover local places you may not have heard of and instead became a way to shove cheaply mass produced junk or freely mass produced digital junk in to eveyone's mailbox.

With that in mind, what services are good at finding local places? I figure services like Yelp and Groupon had this in mind, but generally attract the people who have negative experiences or opinions to share them.

I discount any Yelp review that's 1 or 5 stars. Tends to have good results.

Well this probably has to do with Groupon deals being "bad" for many restaurants/local businesses and not wanting to be burnt by them. I used to take the restaurant ones, and ensure I bought drinks etc and tip appropriately for the full value of the meal.

Speaking to some of the proprietors/staff, people would come in, eat the offer and drink water, then leave without tipping and never be seen again.

You hit on something interesting there. If Groupon delivered great long-term value, they'd have repeat customers. But that wasn't the case. One might then think "that's fine, I'll just use it once to launch my business" and that could be fine for some time as there's always new businesses being started. However once word got around that it wasn't worth it and didn't drive repeat business, that was the other shoe dropping.

It reminds me of the game console crash of '83. It's a great product, but when you gouge your customers you can create a lot of bad feeling that doesn't go away quickly. A company like Groupon could easily be profitable charging businesses a fraction of what they do, but they chose not to. This is the opposite of what most start-ups do (delay profitability until later.) The short-term thinking of overpricing has long-term repercussions for them and any other business that resembles them.

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