This is great advice. The thing many businesses probably fail to realize is that, generally speaking, where [A] is the baseline customer base, the audience with Groupon is not "[A] with some subset of [A] paying cheaper prices" but instead, "[A] + [B], where [B] is an audience they never would have found."

To increase your audience, you almost always have to pay.

In contrast to big business, America especially likes to celebrate and idealize the small business owner as the one who truly knows the value of treating the customer right. But if these stories are frequent, it probably just exposes the sad truth that it's not as common, even in small business, as we like to believe or hope.