Spam
I had to define Groupon as spam to get rid of it. Too much is too much.
Groupon's head of retail is leaving the beleaguered voucher bazaar after just one year in the job. Faisal Masud, who joined Groupon from eBay to run its Goods division, will be leaving at the end of this month to develop ecommerce at office supplies firm Staples. Groupon Goods is the daily deals site's alternative revenue …
It's quite simply because the whole 'crazy level of discount' voucher idea is exactly that - crazy and unsustainable. Not to mention deliberately dishonest. It's nothing but a marketing scam designed to prey on the unwary.
Those businesses which sign up know perfectly well that they can't provide the goods/services at the discounted price and stay in business. The voucher is never more than bait to lure in the naive and unsuspecting in order to hard-sell them loads more and make the deal viable to the business.
The trouble is, people who actually think about it realise that and aren't taken in. They either ignore the vouchers completely, or ignore the hard sell.
People who are genuinely stupid/naive enough to fall for the bait in the short term tell their friends what a scam it was afterwards. So the number of naive punters drops off pretty fast.
Either way, the basic premise for the company working with Groupon becomes untenable. They stop using Groupon or go out of business. Or both. Groupon then find they have no vouchers to sell, so their 'business model' goes up in a puff of smoke, too.