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| Dishkin's Donny Minchillo / Photo by Nicole Rupersburg |
By now you’re familiar with Groupon. Living Social. Half-Off Depot. Hour Detroit’s Deal du Jour. Fox Detroit’s version, the upcoming Free Press version … let’s face it, there’s a TON of copycat discount sites styled after Groupon that follows the same business model – give them your email address, they send you daily emails with discounted deals, and you buy these deals at half off or more from the face value.
For businesses, particularly new and struggling ones, it helps drive traffic through their doors and gets them huge amounts of exposure they wouldn’t have otherwise had; for customers, obviously you’re getting a great deal and nowadays it’s savvy to save. Win/win (for the most part, though there are businesses that have legitimate objections to just how much they’re actually “winning”).
The thing is, the business model is so new – bear in mind, Groupon launched barely over two years ago in Chicago in November 2008 with only 400 email addresses on their mailing list – and the opportunity so infinite that, while we can of course expect these off-shoot sites to keep popping up by the day and there seems to be an endless supply of consumer support for them, there are also some flaws.
Take Groupon, for example. Aside from the moronically goofy intros they insist on including for each deal, (which I consider a flaw but probably most people do not), the speed at which they grew and expanded into new markets allotted for very little localization, and because of the simplicity of the site – both a blessing and a curse – there is no way to narrow down your search parameters.
In preparation for a recent trip to Vegas, I had to keep consulting Google Maps to see just how far off-Strip the various deals were (most of them were pretty far). Here in metro Detroit, deals are scatter-shot across the broad tri-county area in a way that makes sense to pretty much no one (at the time of writing, deals were located in Romulus, Troy, Sterling Heights, Richmond, Royal Oak and Brighton for offers that included discounted bowling and lunch-only seafood specials). And across the board with Groupon, Living Social, Half-Off Depot and all the MANY many others, the offers include everything from … well, bowling discounts to lunch-only seafood specials.
