For the most part, it doesn’t sound like these “bad” customers are doing anything illegal or in violation of TOS. They’re just exploiting offerings for something they wouldn’t normally spend any money on. To be surprised that they don’t stick around long or spend as much as non-incentivized customers shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone and shouldn’t be seen as some kind of failing. They would not normally have used the service anyway so why moan when they use it for a little while and then stop?
It's less a complaint and more a warning to people who try to use this kind of marketing. It generally doesn't work, and where it does.. only very narrowly.
If you are losing money to try and attract customers by this method, you may just burning money. They won't become regular customers, you just lost money for no reason. His point about it working to attract Uber DRIVERS makes sense because it's like a hustle culture thing. You could probably attract sales people or affiliates with this kind of thing, but again, not retail customers.
I had a friend who ran a gym and for a while he kept trying to get more people in using Groupon and Classpass. The problem was that literally zero of them ever converted to a regular membership.
So full paying members were complaining that the classes were getting crowded, meanwhile he was collecting pennies on the dollar from the discounters. In his case at least it was "free revenue" in that it didn't directly cost him anything to serve the discounters. BUT.. If even a single regular member quit due to crowding, it offset 100 Groupon/Classpass people. That's how skewed the economics are.
Nah, there is more than 1 bucket here. There are the poor people, who actually need the coupon to afford it, but they are not usually the problem. The problem is the stingy people. They'll complain the most, try to get refunds the most etc.
Blah blah blah, if they can get it they should. Whatever, I'd rather not have their business, I'll take the 80% of people that are happy.
