I feel like the small business man or woman was hurt the most by groupon, whether it be the mom pop shop or the family owned franchise. And when you exploit them, you hurt America basically. And that isn't a biz model that people can get behind. Had groupon done things differently, we'd be reading a very different article today.
Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
191–200 of 256 posts
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outbound sales I'd imagine. It takes a lot of people to make calls to businesses to convince them to sign up for Groupon, how to structure their deals etc.
Wasn't that a scene in Silicon Valley? Their competitor had like 3 developers and 100 salesmen.
That sounds about right though. The developers are really just building a CMS that should be able to in theory handle an infinite amount of cities, while securing a new sale for one city every day could be a full time job (and probably done best by someone actually in that city).
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#193Even if it was a good deal, who has room in their life for the 1046-th marketing gimmick? Please, interweb geniuses, think of something better.
Yeah, for me, there was a certain novelty value to Groupon and its ilk. But, after the third time I had to go out of my way to redeem something that it wasn't really convenient to redeem, I sort of lost interest. That, combined with the general decline in the quality of deals, meant that at some point it just wasn't worth opening the emails.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. It stopped being a good way to discover local places you may not have heard of and instead became a way to shove cheaply mass produced junk or freely mass produced digital junk in to eveyone's mailbox.
With that in mind, what services are good at finding local places? I figure services like Yelp and Groupon had this in mind, but generally attract the people who have negative experiences or opinions to share them.
I discount any Yelp review that's 1 or 5 stars. Tends to have good results.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the same reason why I'm careful which site I book hotel rooms on. Years ago I thought hotels.com was great and convenient, now I realize your experience is tainted from the moment you book with a third party. Now I make every attempt to book direct.
For hotels the majority of bookings come from third party sites. Why would hotels use third party sites regularly if they hate serving customers that book with them?
Hilton does this by offering Free Wifi if you book directly. Also, delta has been known to hide the lowest prices from search engines.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#196I feel very similar to this blog post I read a few years ago, calling the Groupon era "The Locust Economy".. It wasn't good for businesses, consumers logically just abused the mechanism until these companies were ruined..
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
Thinking about locusts and the behavior of
customers around services like Groupon, I’ve
become convinced that the phrase “sharing
economy” is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a
pig. What we have here is a locust economy.Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#197Anyone else notice they refer to Puerto Rico as "international"? Fun Fact 1: It's a US territory, where residents are US citizens but can't vote for president. Fun Fact 2: Journalists these days ain't what they used to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico
Puerto Rico is a US territory, but technically it's not part of the US. They refer to it as "international" because it is.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their biggest problem is the inability to achieve profitability on $3 billion in sales after so many years in business. They still have $1.1 billion in cash however Doesn't this just mean the investors would be better off winding it down and investing the $1.1b in something that is profitable, or at the very least has a higher ceiling? It doesn't seem all that likely that the latest round of cutbacks is going to tu…
Sadly, a lot of tech companies would perform better if they threw their cash into index-driven mutual funds.
By virtue of the way indices work, a lot of public companies in general would have been better off throwing their cash in index-driven mutual funds. That being said, if it were easy to tell ahead of time which these companies are, it would be easy as an investor to beat index-driven mutual funds.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#199It is just a badly ran business. The Chinese version of Groupon is ran by the very competent Xing WANG, who was a physics graduate student. And last time I looked at it Meituan was worth $15B.
Not really sure why "was a physics graduate student" means anything about his business acumen here. Eric Lefkofsky has a law degree, Brad Keywell has a JD and an MBA, we could do this all day. Having a graduate degree in a hard science could certainly suggest a person has a different way of approaching business, but Wang dropped out so he could unapologetically clone other people's ideas.
Re: Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
But shouldn't Groupon just be a marketing expense? I'm not saying that the company should be ok losing money all the time, but it's common for companies to spend money to acquire customers. Do you avoid all "new customer" deals? It seems like companies on Groupon, for whatever reason, often offer way more of a discount than they're comfortable with. I wonder why that is.
The business might consider it a marketing expense, but the employee might also take a hit through things like reduced tips.
Especially if they preemptively treat the customer horribly!