For the uninformed, Groupon is a service that provides deep discounts, sometimes more than 50%, to retailers and restaurants. From their website:

What is Groupon?

Each day, Groupon features an unbeatable deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in your city. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, we get discounts you won't find anywhere else. We call it "collective buying power!"

For people looking to save some money when they go out, Groupon (and the crop of copycats that have popped up recently) can be seen as a boon. Who doesn't love saving money? Besides saving a lot of money, the daily deals provide an opportunity to check out some great new places that you might otherwise be hesitant to visit. But Groupon has a problem that's beginning to show its ugly head.

Some of the merchants that signup to offer a deal don't set a limit (or at least a reasonable one) on the number of Groupons that can be sold. Literally thousands of people will cash in on some of these deals. Again, who doesn't like saving money? Many of the merchants that sign up are small places that are using Groupon as a way to advertise their business to a broader audience. It's now a proven fact that if your business is lucky enough to be selected as one of the daily deals you will see a huge increase in traffic and transactions. While it's no guarantee, merchants hope this one-time surge will translate into repeat customers for a long time to come and they hope these customers will tell their friends who will then tell their friends and so-on and so-forth.

But, what happens when so many deals are sold that the business has no way to comfortably accommodate the influx of new business? We have first-hand experience with this problem. For businesses, the Groupon instantly creates months long wait time. It's likely that you won't be able to use the great deal you just bought for at least 2-3 months (sometimes more) due to the sudden increase in demand for limited availability. A little frustrated you decide to wait for the initial demand to die down and then you forget about your Groupon. That is, until the week before it expires. Then you scramble to use it before you lose it. So is everyone else but you didn't anticipate it would be THAT bad. But it's bad. Real bad.

Restaurants that before signing up with Groupon never had long wait times for a seat now see 1.5 to 2 hour wait times. At any other time most people would just say "Never mind. We'll try again at a later date." But when this is your last chance to take advantage of your great deal it leaves you little choice but to stick it out. So you try to find a seat at the bar with 50 other people and you wait. And wait. And wait until your name finally gets called. As the hostess takes you to your seat you see just how crowded the place is and just how busy the staff is working. They are literally running all over the place trying to create a great experience for their customers. As if waiting 2 hours for a seat wasn't enough of an issue you quickly learn it's just the beginning.

Undoubtedly, a number of items on the menu will be gone. The restaurant will have simply run out of it. It's usually their signature dishes. Hopefully it's not something you were hoping to try. You'll also have to wait longer for service since your waiter is busy with his other customers. Your food could take longer to come out. Chances are there will be something wrong with it. You can try to say something about it but chances are you're hungry and frustrated enough that you'll say, "Whatever, it's fine."

And herein lies Groupon's biggest problem: their popularity is hurting businesses. "Isn't the great deal supposed to help? Isn't that the point?" That is the point but it's being lost in the customer experience. You don't have to believe me, but the Yelp reviews don't lie. Places that before signing up with Groupon had good reviews are starting to get 3-star reviews that say things like "The food wasn't that great but we had a Groupon so we didn't expect much". Or, "it was ok but I don't think I'd come back here again". Just because a business offers a deal doesn't mean it should throw out the good service or well prepared food to cram it in for the masses. It's going to come back to haunt them on these review websites.

It's not just the customers who get a bad deal but so do the staff that work at these merchants. We've heard from a number of people that say when they see someone with a Groupon come in they prepare themselves for the inevitable bad tip. Most customers that use a Groupon it seems aren't tipping on the full price. They're tipping only on the discount, which as we already mentioned can be a 50% difference. The staff is also going to have some crazy busy nights and more upset customers than usual. The other night we were at a restaurant attempting to use a Groupon that was set to expire in 1 more day and we asked the hostess amidst the craziness if she thought signing up with Groupon was a good idea. We're inclined to believe that her response is pretty typical. She said, "If you ask the owner I'm sure he'd say yes. But if you're asking me I'd never do it again." In other words, the staff at these merchants hates Groupon.

For more information, take a look at this Chicago Tribune article from August of this year: Growing with Groupon may be tricky for businesses - Surge of customers can hurt bottom line or alienate regulars

Greg Gibbs, owner of Chicago Bagel Authority in Lincoln Park, felt this pain firsthand when he signed on with Groupon for a deal-of-the-day in January. His promotion, which cost $3 for an $8 voucher good for any menu item, sold nearly 10,000 Groupons, 10 times more than the top end of Gibbs' expectations.

"This will end up being the year of the Groupon for us, and that's not a good thing," Gibbs said. "We'll count it as a loss."

After splitting 50 percent of the revenue with Groupon, a standard deal for most businesses, the shop netted about $15,000 for $80,000 worth of food. Gibbs said the promotion hasn't yet translated into additional revenue.

"We just don't get the kind of customer that we want to come back," said Gibbs, who saw patrons put items back if their total exceeded $8. "It's a lot of people that come once for the discount, nobody tips, and they're all trying to squeeze it into the exact dollar amount."

Note: emphasis ours

When we say that Tasty CMS is a website management system we mean it. In other words, we're not a blogging system converted into a content management system. We focus first and foremost on making it as easy as possible for small businesses to maintain their website. If we can do that well we've succeeded.

But that doesn't mean that blogging isn't still an important part of running a website. It shouldn't be a primary focus if you're not writing often or if you're not interested in giving your visitors a voice through comments. We have a blog and so we don't begrudge anyone that's willing to make that commitment. Rather than trying to jam an existing blogging system into ours we developed our own blogging system that integrates seamlessly with the fundamentals of a website management system. We stripped out a lot of things that make running a basic blog cumbersome. And like so many other sites now, we outsource the commenting system to Disqus which is ridiculously easy to embed into a website.

One thing that was missing from our blogging system was the ability to work on a blog post ahead of time and then publish it out there later. This was actually something that was bugging us for awhile so we set out to solve our own problem. Starting today, you can convert any web page into a blog post. Because web pages can be set "Under Construction", it's easy to set up a page for the post you're working on and your visitors won't accidentally run into a half finished entry. Therefore, you can load up the page with text modules and photo galleries or whatever modules you need days or weeks beforehand. And then when you're ready to make it live you click a simple link, adjust the date and then save it. Done. The new addition looks like this:

We don't think it could be done any simpler and we're already seeing some very positive feedback:

Can you believe that summer is just about over? It's been a great year so far for Tasty CMS filled with lots of successes. August was no exception. We launched some new sites and we also shared a lot of great links and ideas on Twitter. As a reminder, if you're not following us on Twitter (@TastyCMS) be sure to follow us as we get rolling through September.

This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository.

Below is a short video clip of Apple CEO Steve Jobs from 1997, introducing the TBWA/Chiat Day produced "Think Different" campaign with an unattributed quote from poet Jack Kerouac:

“People who think they are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones who actually do.”

Some people believe that Apple needs to get back to these roots by supporting all of the developers who truly are thinking differently but who are having a hell of a time getting their apps approved for seemingly no reason.

This is some very cool news. Cool because my first real web and design job in college was working for one of the investors of CardMunch, Manu Kumar (@manukumar). In 1998 Manu was running a startup in Pittsburgh near the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) campus. It was a startup in every sense of the word from working on a folding table to Manu doing online teaching in order to cover the costs of his business called SneakerLabs, Inc. At that time we were working on a web-based collaboration service called iMeet. When I graduated from CMU in May 1999 I also decided to leave Pittsburgh and SneakerLabs even though Manu had offered me a full-time position. In March 2000 SneakerLabs was acquired by E.piphany and iMeet was spun off into its own company. In August 2002, iMeet, Inc. merged with Netspoke. In hindsight maybe I should have stuck around.

Today, Manu is the founder of K9 Ventures, an "early stage" venture fund that provides funding and support for concept-stage and seed-stage technology companies. Yesterday Manu helped launch CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. The application is $2.99 and comes with 10 credits (it costs one credit per card entered). Beyond that, it costs around 25 cents per card. The interesting thing about CardMunch is that it actually has humans verify every card that's submitted through their system. Each photo that's uploaded is converted by hand via Mechanical Turk, not through optical character recognition (OCR).

It's great to see Manu continue to do great things 12 years later. Working at SneakerLabs on iMeet got me very interested in website design and development and I'm grateful that I had that opportunity such early on. It gave me a lot of confidence later on in life to design and develop my own ideas; Tasty CMS probably wouldn't be here today if I hadn't spent so much time at a startup.

CardMunch also has a free version if you want to check out the service which I would encourage you to do.

Once again here are some Twitter hi-lites from the month of July. If you're not following us on Twitter (@TastyCMS) jump on over and say hi.