Fresh Grouper The Smart Set
. There are too many departments in such places, too many choices, and we don’t have the time or the inclination to make it all the way through a dense, overly item-filled housewares aisle these days. Groupon satisfies our need for brevity by giving us one thing to choose from, and just 24 hours to mull it over. At 11:59 p.m., the day’s deal expires.For business owners, Groupon is a low-risk proposition. Unlike traditional media outlets, the site charges no upfront fee for access to its audience. Instead, it takes a 30 to 50 percent cut of the revenues a given offer generates. Business owners can set both the minimum number of customers a deal must attract, and a maximum number of those who can take advantage of it. In essence, it allows small businesses to act, in a temporary and controllable way, like a Walmart or Best Buy, generating profits from huge volumes rather than from huge margins.
Even given Groupon’s social networking component, its understanding of Web attention spans, the entertaining copy it uses to soft-sell the masses, and its obvious appeal to business owners, its growth has been remarkable. It now offers daily deals in approximately 90 cities, and it claims to have 6.8 million total daily e-mail subscribers. Collectively, those subscribers have purchased 6.7 million “groupons” in less than two years. Because of such numbers, investment bankers have been cuing up like Yuletide penny-pinchers at a Black Friday sale to get a piece of the action. To date, Groupon has raised more than $170 million in funding .
