Ask HN: What would a better Groupon look like?

Maybe I'm wrong here, but my major issue with Groupon is how you're treated as a customer when you go to the establishment. In my experience, I always get treated worse than a "normal" customer. Either they just care less about you, or it's always like a "what is this? I need to go ask my manager".

That's hard to manage as it's out of your control, but I would love a focus on making people care equally about you (not more, I'm asking to been seen as a normal customer rather than a burden).

Not a Groupon expert but will take a shot at this from the consumer side.

Dropping the terrible stock photos they use and going with an Airbnb approach of helping businesses create their own high quality photos would be a huge improvement in my eyes. Would improve the authenticity and reduce scammy feeling. I absolutely hate the photos they use currently.

I agree with HNcow that there is an implicit concern you are going to get screwed when buying a Groupon (either the business sucks or will treat you poorly). However, in my case, I've almost always had positive experiences with it, and Groupon has done a good job of taking care of me when things when wrong.

Ultimately, if my memory serves me correctly, I think the "best Groupon" was in the early days when it was much smaller and offered a sense of exclusivity for the merchants - resulted in better deals. The challenge with maintaining that is it draws copycats and even Groupon themselves are tempted to scale it too big, leading to what you have now, just another oversaturated marketing channel.

But, I could be wrong about that last paragraph. To my surprise, there are still good deals on Groupon, and I occasionally buy from them.