[steveylang]

Everything you guys say rings true to me. It ended up not adding a great amount of value for either businesses or consumers, and without true added value there's no revenue bite for Groupon.

The stigma of using a coupon didn't bother me so much, most restaurant servers were always cool about redeeming them (and of course I always tipped on the pre-Groupon bill.) But I would sometimes get an (unintentional) negative vibe from higher ups, like great another money-losing customer that I'll never see again. That reaction is what discouraged me from using Groupon, if it just ends up generally being a bad proposition for businesses I'd rather just avoid the whole thing.

Oh man, this reminds me I still have a much of credit at Restaurant.com, which I stopped using a few years ago too...

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it's so much a "stigma" from using a coupon as an additional step you need to at least make sure the server is aware of. And there are probably circumstances like early dates where coupons may send off vibes you don't want to send off.

But, yeah, online if there's a new customer discount or a periodic 20% off one item discount I'll use it to buy something I would probably have bought anyway. For most in-person things, I don't go out of the way to find/use coupons unless it's a very transactional thing like a museum admission.