From: Uganda's Pied Piper
Re: Uganda's Pied piper: I hate to bring this up, but the question over lack of awareness/involvement on the part of American public may require self-examination…
From: Red, White & Harry
Bring on your bad self! If some foraign automaker thinks they can make hay out of detroit, just let'em try We can hang with the best, our automakers…
From: The Poison Apple
Unfortunately, depends on your p.o.v. I don' t have the disposable income to indulge myself in every fad that comes along, ergo, I am a "late joiner"…
The other day my oldest daughter asked me out to lunch at a restaurant that I had been dying to go to. In my mind I knew that she could not afford to take me there and knew that I would end up shelling out some cash to go towards the bill. She immediately said don’t worry mom, “I have a Groupon.”
The truth is, America is still reeling under what some or most are calling the “worst” economic conditions since the “Great Depression.” The unemployment rate has been hovering in the range of 9 to 9.5 percent. There are millions of Americans who are without jobs and have been unemployed for over 27 weeks.
But it looks like another bubble is brewing and brewing rather rapidly that could in fact make things worse. There are plenty of signs that a bubble is forming in the tech sector – the biggest one being Groupons.
The truth is, the way Groupon structures their deals of the day, it usually is something that you can live without but when viewing it you tend to think that if you don’t purchase it that you end up missing out. This in itself will put a lot of American in debt because people tend to look at how much they will save versus how much they are actually spending. The truth is Groupon is destroying the growth of small business while others are getting richer.
In fact, here are some tidbits from Groupons IPO filing:
- Groupon raised a total of $946 million from two rounds of funding since 2010. Approximately, $810 million was spent as bonuses to top executives and the rest went to Groupon’s early backers.
- As a measure of its financial strength, Groupon developed a new accounting metric for its IPO: Adjusted consolidated segment operating income (CSOI), which excludes “online marketing expense, acquisition-related costs and stock-based compensation expense” which is pretty much the biggest expense for any internet company, and earned Groupon a rap on the knuckles from the SEC.
If Groupon isn’t the harbinger of an impending bubble about to burst, then I don’t know what is.
Do you think Groupon is a great program for consumers or a slippery slope?
Graphic Credit:
Animationfactory.com
