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From 718 Cyclery:
Running a small business, successful or not, seems to attract the attention of Groupon and its clones (Living Social, etc). At first I listened to their pitches (slightly flattered), and ran some numbers on my own. The results were so distressing that I walked away within a few minutes.
Good point, but the fact that they never bothered to run spell check on their post takes away a great deal of their credibility.
That is why you don’t do Groupons for merch. You do it on labor. How much to you pay your mechanic an hour? How much is a full tune up? I think this math will work out much better for you. Plus it gets consumers into your shop and if they buy a tune up they will buy a helmet or a light or a bell or a new brake cable.
My shop has been doing Groupon for years now and we rack in the money from all the extra sales. You just gotta do it on the cheap labor not on expensive merch.
It doesn’t build much morale to call your labor “cheap.”
I worked for a restaurant that ran a groupon deal. They lost well over $15K. In the end, the restaurant fired 11 employees to clear enough overhead to cover the building mortgage and pay their invoices that had lapsed to 90 days.