For months and months, I got a daily offer from Groupon, of which I actually used 5 or 7, and this week, I agreed to take someone out to dinner in Manhattan to pick his brain, thinking “I’ll use one of them Groupon thingies I’m always getting.” And then I thought: “Hmmm, haven’t actually gotten a Groupon in quite a while.”
Did my secret Groupon account just expire at some point? Did they decide I was using too many of them? Too few? Can I write to Groupon and ask to be “reinstated”? How does this work?
Groupon hasn’t been doing very well recently; among other things, they’ve been laying off workers, including the sales staff that are responsible for arranging these deals in the first place. What’s more, companies are starting to realize that deal-conscious customers aren’t as likely to turn into repeat customers (paying at full freight) as they might have thought. So it may just be that the deals aren’t occurring as often.
This said, I’ve never used Groupon myself, so maybe there is some secret handshake that I don’t know about.
Groupon is still sending daily (and then some) emails. Have you checked whether they’re ending up in your spam folder? Have you logged on to Groupon’s web site using your email and password to see if it still recognizes you? Try going to Groupon’s Email Subscriptions page (vai the menu in the upper right corner, once you’ve logged in). Are the boxes for the types of emails you want all checked?
I get daily emails from Groupon as well as updates from the iPhone app. I have noticed the restaurant offers aren’t nearly as good as they have been in the past. I’m not sure if it is a seasonal factor or if restaurants are realizing that Groupon doesn’t generate them as many repeat customers as they’d like.
Most of the Groupon deals I’ve been seeing are on household items, towels, sheets, kitchen goods or small electronics such as earbuds, laptop speakers, or iPhone docks.