How Groupon's UK insiders are ripping off UK public

The Advertising Standards Agency referred Groupon to the Office of Fair Trading last week. http://www.asa.org.uk/Media-Centre/2011/ASA-to-refer-complai...

Groupon has breached the ASA's code 50 times so far this year. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/07/groupon-bre...

I generally really dislike the Groupon approach and have since it started.

The size of the discounts they enforce ensures a constant stream of people convinced they are getting a great deal without really mentally evaluating and doing due diligence on the offer: "Hey wow! 87% off?! This must be a great deal I shouldn't miss out on it!".

On the flip side for most genuine honest businesses these levels of discounts are almost certainly a bad thing. They only consider them because of the promise of "more jam tomorrow" when the customers come back at full price. The problem being that they don't - they were only there for the deal price.

This is the icing on the cake though. Whenever you create a new channel for selling products or services it won't be long before the scammers and conmen arrive in force to take advantage of it while they can.

Whether or not these conclusions are accurate, Groupon at least in the UK does appear to be very fishy.

The sheer number of "business consultants" (read: graduates doing sales) they are listing jobs for (http://jobs.groupon.co.uk/) is staggering and points very much towards a deluded sense of their own scope.

That's so dodgy, did they run out of legitimate businesses to run offers with, so they have to create new entities?