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> For customers, Groupon adds almost no value

And yet my girlfriend and her friends spend a shit-load of money on items they find on it, because "it's such good value".

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I think they meant customers as in business paying groupon for the deals.

Parent's point stands. We have actively spent some money at places my wife found a groupon for that we otherwise would have spent no money at.

Groupon's modus operandi is that the business is (usually) making a loss or zero/negligible profit from the deal for the opportunity to generate future (post-groupon) business from those customers (or their friends).

Spending no money at all might either be worse (they've lost more than they earned) or no better (zero sum) than buying the coupon depending on your future intentions.

Or do you mean that you've returned and purchased again from those places?

In our case, we haven't returned. Whenever she gets her hair cut now, she finds somewhere that's on offer, which is a specialization of the bigger point, that she nows uses GroupOn with the expectation that there will be a deal on something she wants...

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