The Bad Deal: Check Before You Buy an "Online Deal"!
Are you familiar with The Bad Deal? Its proprietor, Ryan Sutton, tracks the ever-expanding group coupon (or, in the parlance, a "GROUPON," LOL) industry for things that are frankly fairly terrible. (For instance? $140 for 90 minutes of stuffing wings in your face at Professor Thoms dive bar. No thanks!) And today comes word of the Daily Candy $80 brunch… in midtown. They break it down like this:
CHARLEE: Hey babe. Wanna have brunch in Midtown Manhattan?
RENEE: Not really, who goes to Midtown on the weekends?
CHARLEE: But I bought us this great offer: two courses and two cocktails.
RENEE: $40 bucks? A cocktail each? Sure That’s enough to share.
CHARLEE: Wait, sweetie, there’s no sharing allowed with this deal. So I had to buy two vouchers. So technically that’s $80 bucks.
RENEE: Hold on, I thought we were saving money?
CHARLEE: Yes, we’re saving 35 percent! Of course, we’re supposed to tip on the original price of $63 per person, so after tax and 18% tip that comes to $109.
RENEE: We’re spending $109 on brunch? Listen, we could have gone to Balthazar, ordered two Bloody Marys, half a dozen oysters, foie gras terrine and apple pancakes for $79 bucks — and we’d be tipping on $79, not some fictional $123 that we’d never have spent anyway!
Slagging Prof. Thoms? Are you two fighting again?
The wings at Thoms are actually pretty good.
Nice hive mind, dude.
The good things about Groupon are that 1) You have 24 hours to change your mind about a purchase and get your money back and 2) if you don't do 1 and end up in any way dissatisfied with your purchase, they give you back your money with no hassle. I had a pretty disappointing experience at a local company that I was willing to take a chance on expressly because of the Groupon discount, and they treated me like Julia Roberts at that first dress shop in Pretty Woman. Talk about taking your librarian fetishes too seriously. Anyway, that happened on a Friday, I wrote Groupon on a Saturday, and the refund process was completed by Tuesday. That's service.
But there's discount on earth that makes it worth to try to have brunch in Midtwon. Shudder.
I love that people are so stupid that a website like this even has to exist. "LOOK, COUPON!" Seriously?
I saw a deal like this for a Midtown Italian place once, when Groupon first rolled out and started becoming popular. I saw the price and thought it seemed like not a terribly great deal for most restaurants, so I went to the restaurant's own website to check out the prices and crunched the numbers. They had a deal on their own menu that worked out to exactly the same amount. But I bet they made their tipping point on that deal.
i like scoutmob because you don't have to buy anything in advance and it's usually 50% off on something i would do anyway.
@birah r. Yes, this. They're going to be 7 days a week in NY soon enough. We are obsessed with it here in its homeland of Atlanta.
@birah r. I used Scoutmob the other day in NYC to get half off at a pub near the theater I was going to. I don't understand how the companies benefit from this, but if they're will to give me half off, I'd be crazy to question this in any greater detail.