Flutterby™! : Posies Cafe on Groupon 2010-09-21 14:28:14.231226+00

Posies Cafe on Groupon

2010-09-21 14:28:14.231226+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Posies Cafe: Groupon in retrospect, about why they're playing hard and firm with expiration dates:

In short, to dear Lucinda and anyone else that comes in with a Groupon in hand, please know that our respectful decline of your coupon is not personal. It’s because we cannot afford to lose any more money on this terrible decision I made, and the only saving grace we had was an expiration date.

Many years ago I was talking with a restaurateur about coupons and coupon cards, and he mentioned that they're the worst way for a service-oriented business (like a restaurant) to attract customers, because the people coming in are worried about price, and only ever come once.

Seems like Groupon is teaching this to a new generation of business owners.

Doc Searls wrote a very good post about this issue: Keeping relationship humanized

Interesting. I wonder how that notion of coupons and "the right kind of customer" relates to the strategy at Michael's, where they use coupons to create a kind of dedicated "in group".

I'm also struggling with some severely unfinished thoughts on buying local, and building relationships with local businesses, versus buying on the net. Especially when we're doing much of our product research on the net, having to go around our local vendors to try to get information straight from the manufacturer's reps, and looking at paying a 50% premium for local.

And one of the guys I run with owns a couple of restaurants and we've had some interesting discussions about building repeat customers. A lot of his strategy is finding people who come in alone (they're coffee shop/café sort of venues), sitting down and talking with them and buying them lunch. Or doing coupons, but by way of hanging out in a bar down the street and handing the coupons out personally.

That Doc Searls article reminds me that I need to finish writing my promotion- scraping Twitter bot, especially as the ski season starts up. Try searching Twitter for "RT to win". You'll see what I mean!

I'm a pretty hard core coupon user. My wife and I rarely go out if it doesn't involve a coupon or a customer loyalty card. And we usually don't buy drinks. That means we can typically get dinner for two for less than $10.

Oddly, we do spend $15 most weekend mornings for breakfast at a local coffee shop. We're happy to pay a little more for a pleasant experience when that's what we are going for. The $10 dinner is more "just finished work at 7:30pm and don't want to cook, much less clean up".