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Groupon Cuts Over 500 Staff, Plans To Focus 'Only On Mission-Critical Activities' (techcrunch.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the sign-of-the-times dept.
Groupon confirmed to TechCrunch that it's laid off more than 500 of its employees -- 15% of its 3,416-person headcount. It's also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." From the report: "Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we are taking decisive actions to improve our trajectory," CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. The chief executive says that the layoffs, as well as a reinvestment in marketing and initiatives that drive customer purchase frequency, will set the company up to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2022.

In a letter to staff, Deshpande said that Groupon is reducing its North America sales teams to focus on "self-service merchant acquisition capabilities." It is also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." "In addition, we are proposing to reduce cloud infrastructure and support functions as we wrap up cloud migrations." Groupon is also closing its Australia Goods business, more than a decade after launching there in the first place. Finally, Groupon said that it will "rationalize" its real estate footprint to be more in line with hybrid work. "Over the past few years, the number of Groupon shoppers has fallen sharply," adds TechCrunch. "According to Statista, 22.2 million visitors to the company's site purchased at least one offer in Q1 2022, down from nearly 54 million in Q4 2014."

The report notes that these cuts aren't as large as the ones made in 2020 when Groupon said it would lay off or furlough 2,800 employees following the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Groupon Cuts Over 500 Staff, Plans To Focus 'Only On Mission-Critical Activities' More

Groupon Cuts Over 500 Staff, Plans To Focus 'Only On Mission-Critical Activities'

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  • Bye, Felicia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:11PM (#62776486)
    Will the last rat to desert the sinking Groupon ship please turn off the lights?

    • Will the last rat to desert the sinking Groupon ship please turn off the lights?

      It seems like every day now some tech company or another is either laying off people outright or essentially threatening to if their staff doesn't become more productive (Google, in that last case). There are also lots of statements from these companies about "focusing on core mission". All this tells me that they see the money slowing down and the market tightening significantly, so they're cutting out the fat. Look for more and more companies cutting out non-essentials, and laying off more staff.

      • In Groupon's case if they want to focus on mission critical activities there's only one: liquidation. The only reason this insane company survived as long as it did is because of all the dumb money that was propping them up. Money that is shutting off, now that every asset class has lost value along with the increased federal funds rate. See ya Groupon, it was fun while it lasted!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        It seems like every day now some tech company or another is either laying off people outright or essentially threatening to if their staff doesn't become more productive (Google, in that last case). There are also lots of statements from these companies about "focusing on core mission". All this tells me that they see the money slowing down and the market tightening significantly, so they're cutting out the fat. Look for more and more companies cutting out non-essentials, and laying off more staff.

        No, it's

  • Missed Opportunity (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:25PM (#62776512)

    Headline should read "Groupon - 15% off!"

  • "Over the past few years, the number of Groupon shoppers has fallen sharply," adds TechCrunch.

    That's because over the past few years, there's been a pandemic-induced everything shortage and genuine "deals" have become few and far between. Deals/coupon sites these days are mostly just full of promoted crap that nobody wants, Wish.com-grade garbage that was built to a low price point by cutting every possible corner, and good old fashioned "fake sales" where the retailer tripled the fair market price of the item and then marks that inflated price down by half to make people who are bad at math believ

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Far worse for groupon was they provide a whole lot of deals on stuff that the pandemic cut back on like places to go or events.

    • Re:Gee I wonder why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:56AM (#62776706) Homepage

      That's because businesses realized Groupon (along with the 300 copies that spring up and went away half a year later) wasn't drumming up repeat customers, but just people who wanted to take advantage of the sales.

      Pandemic has very little to do with it. Business model was dead before the pandemic.

      • Though I have to admit it was nice for a while, being able to eat at Michelin starred restaurants for half price. Before they all caught onto how dumb of an idea this was.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by vivian ( 156520 )

          I found it a terrible experience. I was given a groupon voucher to the Hard Rock Cafe in my hometown as a gift, but to use it was painful in the extreme - from having to pre-book at least 24 hours in advance with a clunky online system and go through multiple confirmation steps, to then being limited to a very narrow range of set meals.

          When I got to the face, food was not as good as the usual choices, with smaller portions and a set menu, and I couldn't swap out an entree item in the set meal for a cheaper

    • Keeping in mind Grouponâ(TM)s original value proposition was to group consumers together to buy products in bulk at large discounts. Whatever happened to that?

    • That's because over the past few years, there's been a pandemic-induced everything shortage

      No, there's been an everything shortage due to a panicky government response. The pandemic was only a spark, but our government provided the fuel and O2 to the shitstorm.

      An important distinction I wish more people understood.

      • A lot of my thoughts from two years ago have been vindicated. Not that anyone paid attention to my warnings. I mean, I was no expert, how could I possibly counter the "Trust the science" crowd with my hysterical rantings.

        Turns out, mister "I am science" wasn't anything of the sort, just an overpaid political hack. Who knew?

        • Me too. The moment I heard "trust the science", I knew we were fucked.

          Science isn't science if it's unquestionable.

  • Work two jobs for the pay of one.

  • No businesses sign up for a second Groupon deal. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:54PM (#62776638)
    That's why they need 3,416 employees - most of them salespeople phoning small businesses to sell deals. Groupon has put many small businesses out of business. Groupon pays the small business very slowly and keeps almost half what the customer pays for the coupon.
  • I am not surprised. I have not used them in a long time but was browsing activities in Miami to do on a Saturday and found tens of Groupons for JetSki rentals for under $10. I thought this was odd as I was pretty sure they run about ten times that. I found them all to have variations on the same bait and switch scam. A “detail” that says something along the lines of “fuel, life vests and other fees not included”. When I contacted several of them they told me these feels add up to abo

  • I've bought several deals on groupon for items, such as sdcards, bluetooth headsets, and having had good luck with those buys, I decided to try a service deal. Since I needed my a/c ducts cleaned, I found a deal for this, paid the price, and tried to contact the vendor, first thing out of the vendors mouth was "we don't service your zip code".. Contacted groupon and they refunded the cost. Found another deal for duct cleaning, paid for it, contacted the vendor and found that there would be a nearly $80 upch

  • Surprised they lasted this long (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @11:12AM (#62777390)
    Groupon's entire business model was predicated on aggressive marketing, fucking over small businesses with lies and hyper expansion to move into new territories when they burned through the existing one. This was especially the case for the likes of restaurants & hotels who'd be deluged with freeloaders who'd eat below cost and disappear the minute the deals did resulting in a lot of failures. Rinse and repeat. About the only things that Groupon even sells these days are "discounts" for services where there are very little material costs.

    If they are finally feeling financial stress themselves then great. I hope they crash and burn. It's just a pity that the shysters who started the company took the money and ran before any of that happened.

  • All groupon is now is a rummage sale, having trash offers, for trash products and trash services.
  • The initial "Groupon" idea didn't seem to be that bad.

    "Hey, I want to buy a bicycle, if I get a group of 150 people together who also want this same bicycle what kind of deal can we get if we buy 150 bikes instead of just one?"

    Then it just turned into deals for haircuts and house cleaning services, in the hope of repeat business.

    I guess in the end there weren't enough people in the first category for viability.

  • It was a money-printing machine. Sell coupons, pocket half the cash, provide a website. One employee could register like 10 bargains per hour, and each of these would rake in a couple $1000s. Add a couple admins to maintain the website, a couple marketing people to reach out and promote the business, and you're raking cash in, with token costs; cost per customer (business to promote) like $20, income like $2000.

    It takes some incredible mismanagement to lose out on this business model.

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