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Comment by drx | Hacker News Reader

>Am I the only one not seeing the point of these coupon sites?

http://www.evanmiller.org/golden-football.html

"Groupon provides the mechanism to move businesses and customers over to a part of the diagram previously regarded as unreachable. It only works because customers can collectively commit to buying more than they would with a run-of-the-mill coupon."

But it breaks down when that business fails to increase it's capacity. Case in point: I used groupon once for a restaurant and the experience was horrible. The restaurant was completely unprepared for the number of people showing up. On paper I got $40 bucks worth of food and service for $20 bucks, but the experience was so bad I wish I had stayed home and saved my $20 bucks.

In my situation the restaurant and Groupon dropped the golden football.

I've also seen restaurants offering such deals ask if you're using a GroupOn voucher before presenting you with a menu, the menu you're then given is not the same as the usual menu. Items are more expensive (over-priced I would say), and the selection is narrower.

From a business perspective the failure to convert into repeat business has long known to be a problem, but now having experienced GroupOn as being a second class experience I simply won't be using it again.

In fact, the limited experience of GroupOn in our household has been such that they've successfully made us dubious of the entire offers/group-buying thing and leave us preferring to get personal service and avoiding the offerings of GroupOn and all of their competitors.

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