[chavesn]

This is great advice. The thing many businesses probably fail to realize is that, generally speaking, where [A] is the baseline customer base, the audience with Groupon is not "[A] with some subset of [A] paying cheaper prices" but instead, "[A] + [B], where [B] is an audience they never would have found."

To increase your audience, you almost always have to pay.

In contrast to big business, America especially likes to celebrate and idealize the small business owner as the one who truly knows the value of treating the customer right. But if these stories are frequent, it probably just exposes the sad truth that it's not as common, even in small business, as we like to believe or hope.

[SilasX]

Bingo. I saw pre-internet confusion on this point from small businesses too. I remember being little and my mom got a coupon at the car wash for a pizza at some nearby place. When we went to use it, the manager turned us down saying, "nah, this is dine-in only, yeah, otherwise we don't make any money off it".

Even at that age, I was like, "wha? But, isn't that the purpose of a promotion? So someone tries your stuff and might come back?" It wasn't like a coupon in the back of a magazine, but something the car wash guy actively promoted.