Today's New York City Groupon offering is a 50% discount at Housing Works' nonprofit thrift stores, which raise money to assist people living with HIV. For $20, you can receive $40 worth of things! Oh, just FYI: "A pair of designer shoes that sells for $40 in one of our stores provides ten days worth of hot meals for a homeless HIV+ mother and her child." Enjoy your discount. :(
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? [...]
The Groupon IPO filing is delightful! It's an enormous, amazing business.
We increased our subscriber base from 152,203 as of June 30, 2009 to 83.1 million as of March 31, 2011.
We sold 116,231 Groupons in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 28.1 million Groupons in the first quarter of 2011.
We grew from 37 employees as of June 30, 2009 to 7,107 employees as of March 31, 2011.
That's incredible! Also? Net loss, before taxes, for all of 2010? $456 million. They lost $146 million last quarter. So yes, last year they lost more than half the value of this year's planned $750 million [...]
