[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Opps, I forgot to mention those groups that go around selling booklets of coupons which you find the stores will not accept.

[ZirconEncrustedTweezers]

I never buy those because they typically contain lots of coupons for things I have no use for at places I wouldn’t patronize.

[rarestia]

People go to extraordinary means to bend a buck. When I was in high school economics, we were taught that coupon clipping is beneficial on a curve. There's a diminishing value of returns where it's no longer financially beneficial to clip coupons due to the overwhelming amount of time required to do so. The Internet (read: Groupon) made this process easier, but there's still a labor element.

I agree with Ruy that going this route is overly laborious. Instead of wasting time on websites or in newspapers, take up a second job to make up the difference in your savings. In reality, you're buying products or services you normally wouldn't all in the name of "savings." You can save MORE by not spending at all. Again, diminishing value of returns.

Then there's this:

But Groupon's core businesses, like restaurants and spas, have a relatively high marginal cost of providing their service: food, labor, laundry.

--snip--

Restaurants, who were supposed to be one of the core businesses for daily deals, complained that Groupon customers were disproportionately poor tippers who took up tables while carefully not spending any more than the face value of the Groupon--no drinks, no dessert.

This is the most telling part of the article. This whole fad isn't about saving. It's about getting something for nothing. Whereas when I go to a restaurant, I go to one that the wife and I frequent often, and because we're known as good tippers, we get stellar service. Getting my tacos fresh or my pizza warm is infinitely more important to me than saving $4 on an appetizer that I'd normally never get and leaving that poor server a shitty tip despite otherwise decent service.