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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

I think I’ve heard that in China, there are lots of companies that do some sort of group purchases for large residential buildings. Ie they essentially do a big Costco run for everyone and they get a big discount. I’m surprised Groupon didn’t pivot to do that.

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Judging by sibling comments, there's some kind of ambiguity here... I assume when you refer to "a big Costco run for everyone" you are talking about purchasing groceries, household goods etc on behalf of a group of people who already live in a large residential building. Not, as the first sentence might imply, a group of people coming together to buy the building itself?

I think the only way it makes sense to interpret it as them buying the building is if you believe Costco sells large residential buildings.

You can buy the Costco store inside the Costco store and then take it to another Costco store and get a refund...great customer service

I initially thought they meant that the building was converted to somehow function like a warehouse for a grocery store or something, but for the most part couldn't make heads or tails of the second half of the sentence. It took me three or four reads to arrive at the correct meaning.

Oh, yes, sorry my phrasing was ambiguous. Not buying the property but buying household items for the residents. Buying the property would be a significantly larger pivot for Groupon.

GPT-3 has a better reading comprehension...

There's an interesting group purchase model for properties in Turkey. Essentially a 100 people come together and sign an agreement and start paying monthly fees and these fees are used to purchase homes. Each time the property is purchased, the owner is determined randomly from the group. Those who get the home pay more(since they will no longer pay rent), those who are still waiting pay less.

We had similar thing in Poland in the nineties for buying cars, when credit was too expensive for many people to use. It was called "Argentinian system", so it might have Argentinian roots?

Interesting, I guess people re-invented the system all over the world. In Turkey at least, the system is analog of the "gold day" tradition of the housewives who would gather in each others house in rotation and give the host money or gold to finance the purchase of things like fridges etc.

A similar system exists in the south Indian state of Kerala (and apparently across other places in South Asia, but I am only familiar with the Kerala model). It's called a Chit fund [0] and functions just like you describe.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chit_fund

Fun to see similar informal mechanisms popping up around the world with no connection.

Are there any articles about this?

AFAIK "Eminevim" is the original company doing it, here is a link to their FAQ: https://www.eminevim.com/merak-edilenler

In Turkish of course but Google Translate is pretty good these days.

It's promoted as an option for people who don't want to use credit(for religious reasons or simply they can't). It's also analogous to the Turkish tradition of housewives gathering at the homes of each other in rotation and giving money to the current host to finance a larger purchase like fridge or something. Its called "Altın Günü" or "gold day" as traditionally they would collect gold, but these days any currency goes.

You are thinking of drop.com and even Kickstarter to some extent. Those serve hobbyist niches, where the margin of the "good stuff" tends to be very high and it makes sense to drop that through a group order.

I wonder if we have optimized away that margin in our amazon and walmartified supply chains and there is less need for bulk ordering.

I remember using a site like that a while ago, but don’t recall the name. Basically they’d put up offers on the website but only if a certain number of people committed to buy at the price. It was usually electronics and sometimes the discount can be significant (but mostly 10-20% off)

Probably Massdrop?

Yea that sounds right. Thanks!

Isn't that a large issue in their housing market at the moment? I believe many developers have run out of money due to the pandemic and their residential building projects have staled out. A lot of everyday people have seemingly lost all of their savings through these schemes.

The large issue is the land where people want to live is already filled, and nobody is allowed to build larger on that land. Houses next to each other can be turned into apartments quickly and easily, but the law won't allow you to do that. In the exurbs houses are on lots large enough for an apartment on their own - and exurbs from the 1970s are not just regular suburbs. Sometimes an investor will buy a house and wait until the others next to it are sold and then turn the 2-6 lots into one apartment. However they are not allowed to do that.

They're spending all their savings on a Costco run?

I wonder how that would work.

Everyone bids on what they would pay and then Groupon goes to negotiate a price?

Then everyone waits?

I've participated in something like this for chicken feed. Someone makes a spreadsheet, collects payments, and sets up the order with the vendor; it gets delivered via a regional freight carrier (less than truckload), everybody shows up and picks up their stuff. Rinse and repeat once a quarter. No real bidding process, everything is at a fixed price, but better than retail.

I think 'co-operatives' tend to be set up for just this purpose. Typically to distribute the burden of investing in and maintaining space or capital equipment but I imagine they also organize bulk orders of specialist materials.

Would be interesting to see if anyone could beat traditional retail pricing as far as say Costco items go in the US.

it's called 团购, which is literally (group buying)

they just buy in large quantities and resell at slightly lower price than consumers can get individually

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