Getting a great deal using online deal sites that issue vouchers for local businesses can be pretty sweet. But by now, many customers are finding out that there are plenty of trials and tribulations involved when it comes to redeeming deal vouchers, as businesses scramble to keep up with the onslaught coupons.
One couple relays a story of epic ridiculousness on their LiveJournal blog, after dealing with a restaurant that imposed a limited menu on its Groupon customers. While a limited menu is all well and good, actually doubling the prices for someone using a voucher is really not acceptable.
They were expecting some limitations, as avid users of online voucher programs, and decided to call ahead and make sure everything was squared up before dining. The $50 Groupon Now! voucher was for use the day after its purchase, and included a 5-course meal for a party of two for that price. Calling ahead was a good idea, as the hostess explained that there was a separate menu, with a few things excluded from the usual menu. Great! All systems go!
We go to the restaurant tonight and the first thing I tell our hostess is that we’re using a Groupon. She informs us the Groupon is only for yesterday, and that it expired and can’t be used today. I had to pull the original deal and the voucher up on my phone to prove to her that yes, it WAS for today, she called over the front manager who also looked at it, agreed and said fine, we could use it. Again, no biggie.
We also tell our waitress the deal with the Groupon and that we were told we had to order off a special menu. She left the regular menus with us, then hunted down the Groupon-only menus. We started perusing the regular menus just to see what they had to offer. The waitress brings back the Groupon-only menus, takes our drink orders, and leaves. The very firs thing we noticed when we started looking through the Groupon menu was that EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, was MORE than double the price on the regular menu! So say the regular menu has pasta faggioli for $14, the Groupon menu had it priced for $32. Never mind we wouldn’t have even known had the waitress not left the regular menus with us. WHAT!
Whatever, the voucher is supposed to cover the entire meal, and it’s not a price thing. We confirmed this with the waitress when she came back with our drinks, and she assured us that yes, the voucher covers everything and she really didn’t know why the prices were on the menu or why they were more expensive. Okay… I’m a little nervous, but I figure she knows what she’s talking about.
Dinner goes great, the food was awesome, and our waitress was a sweetheart; there were maybe 2 tables besides us, so she would sit and talk with us about whatever while we waited for the next course. All in all, a really good experience, and we both agreed we’d definitely come back, Groupon or not.
And then the bill came. The front-end manager brought it out to us instead of our waitress, dropped it and said someone would be back shortly. I said something about how we had a Groupon, and he yelled back that the waitress would handle that as he was walking away. Okay.. so we open the bill, and low and behold, we’re being charged DOUBLE THE PRICE OF THE REGULAR MENU for our ENTIRE meal, $156!, when it was supposed to be covered by the Groupon! Our waitress comes back and we explain the situation, and she apologized profusely and went to find the front-end manager again. It took 15 minutes for him to finally make it out front, and which point he explained that the Groupon was for $50 off of our meal, not for the entire meal. I pull up the voucher and again show him what the terms of the deal are, and he literally waves his hands like he’s brushing me off and says, no, Groupon is wrong, this is what the deal is. Okay, so wait, I paid $50 for $50 in credit, and you’re charging me TWICE what you would charge me if I DIDN’T have a Groupon? He says well, we have to cover our expenses, we can’t just give away free food to anyone with a Groupon. Uh, yes you can, because that’s what your Groupon says. And he just walks away again, no apology, no resolution, just.. whatever, you’re on your own.
Our waitress comes back and asks if everything’s settled, and obviously, it’s not. My husband gets this bright idea that if we nix the Groupon voucher, we should hypothetically be charged the regular price for our meal ($78) and we’ll just get a refund from Groupon later. The waitress, who already has bent over backwards trying to make this work for us, agrees that this makes sense, and immediately goes to fix our bill. Magically, the front-end manager suddenly appears again and is now irate that we’ve apparently “worked the system.” My husband lied and said that the Groupon thing was a mistake – it actually did expire yesterday, so we can’t even give it to you to use it, and it was our fault, sorry for causing so much trouble, we just want to pay the regular price and be gone. The waitress backed him up, said she read it herself, she tried to enter it in the computer and it came back expired, etc (god bless her). After a few minutes of back-and-forth with the manager, he finally relents that since we don’t actually have a Groupon, it would be fine for us to pay “regular price” if we don’t apply the Groupon to our bill and that’s that. Thankfully, we had enough cash on us, so we pay our bill with cash just in case someone tries to get creative and add more charges to our card, leave the waitress a huge tip and a thank-you note for jumping in unprompted and essentially lying to her boss for us, and go out to our car to go home.
So there are multiple levels of shenanigans going on here. The couple called Groupon and got their money refunded back to their credit card, and found out there was already another complaint against the restaurant. Perhaps there should be a formal Groupon rule against raising prices for Groupon customers — after all, it is supposed to be a deal.
Bad Service [LiveJournal]
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Almost like a bait & switch or one of those liquidation sales where prices are jacked.
As long as the restaurant puts the conditions for using the Groupon on the coupon I guess they should be able to do it.
I used a Groupon just last week at a local middle eastern style restaurant. I’m an avid user of Groupon because it saves a good amount of money and exposes me to places I wouldn’t otherwise experience.
I always let the server know that I have a groupon so I can give them the opportunity to explain how the deal works at their establishment. Sometimes it’s $X amount spent on a groupon for $XX worth of food and other times it’s outlined (for example) as spend $X on a Groupon for 1 Appetizer, 2 entrees, 1 dessert, a $XX value.
In the case of last week, I was front and center about the groupon and we were told by our server we can order an appetizer up to a certain amount and entrees up to a certain amount, and any dessert. In most cases we get a bill that represents the actual cost of the meal and see the groupon deal applied (basically as the bill being substracted from itself, not including tax). We payed just tax and tip and were on our way.
Ironically this restaurant was under staffed and we were paying tax/tip with cash. I don’t like just leaving it on the table and prefer just to hand it to the server or have them pick it up. The funny thing is as I waited for her to return, it was taking a long time so I gave it to her as another customer was arguing with her.
This other customer also had a groupon, but had purchased items that were OVER the limits stated by the server and was expected to pay the difference. Although this particular groupon did not specifically state the price limitations of items, I have seen and purchased other groupons in the past which DO state the “up to” amounts for each food item. —- This is the standard that all really should abide by so this is as transparent as possible. I’m surprised that groupon does not make them do this. I really hope a policy change is applied to this in the future.
As for the practice of having a completely different menus which state higher prices for those using a groupon, I think since this is a very gray area of business, some establishments are taking advantage while they can, but it will ultimately only end up hurting them in the end.
The only correct and final answer to the question posed by the
title to this story is – No, NO, a thousand times no! As far as my
experience does, Groupon is nothing more than a way to get
swarms of people to pig out on something at a slightly reduced
price. It’s intent is to make you a complete tool.
I really feel for the restaurant in this case because the owners obviously got in way over their heads, but they really handled this the wrong way. They should have put more restrictions on the deal up front, such as “must make reservations at least one day in advance,” or they should have put a dollar limit on the meal. They also could have said up front that the voucher was only good for a certain subset of higher-margin offerings. The alternate menu after the fact was just wrong, and it was probably in reaction to the owner’s feeling of, “Oh, crap, what did I just do!?” I think what happened in this author’s situation was that the restaurant had multiple offerings for their Groupon: for example, one option for a fixed dollar amount (“$20 of food for $10″) and another more expensive option for the entire experience. At the very least, the restaurant should have limited the maximum number of Groupons that could be sold.
Groupons just don’t make business sense for most businesses–yet Groupon is relentless in trying to sign up every single business anyway. What most consumers don’t understand is that the business gets 25% or less of the face value of the voucher–which can work great if your business is strictly filling unused capacity (like a gym membership or fitness class), but if you have to factor in cost of goods, staffing more employees, etc., it’s hard just to cover costs. My wife and I own a small restaurant/cafe, and Groupon and similar daily deals sites have been pestering us for more than a year to run a deal. But every time I’ve run the numbers, the amount of money we’d lose doing a Groupon has far exceeded our entire monthly advertising budget. What most businesses don’t get is that Groupon is strictly an advertising device, and you need to treat it just like any traditional advertising device where you throw a pile of money into a big pit and hope some of it comes back in the form of new customers who will think about your business the next time they’re trying to figure out where to spend their hard-earned cash.
I am both a Groupon user (consumer) and a Groupon merchant.
Every experience I’ve had with Groupon as a company is that they are extraordinary in their customer service, both to their customers and their merchants.
There’s no question that every part of the behavior on the part of the restaurant was not only inexcusable, but violated the terms of Groupon’s relationship with them. And I’m not at all surprised that a senior official from Groupon called the client back, because we’ve found that they are very responsive.
For my company, we’ve run Groupon promotions twice, and it’s worked out for everyone. We’ve made money on upsells, gotten many repeat clients, Groupon made money on the deals, and our mutual customers got some great deals on our services.
The mistake many companies make is considering Groupon as a way of making money. It isn’t It’s a way of advertising your business, and getting new clients. The discount a business offers to the customer (and the portion of income it pays to Groupon) is an advertising expense, and should be seen as such. If viewed that way, Groupon can be an excellent investment for businesses, and customers should feel safe visiting any Groupon merchant because if there’s a problem, Groupon will definitely make good on it.