Online Coupons Overload

Unless you have been off the internet for the past 1 year, you must have heard or seen about this recent online coupon or discount craze. I’m talking about those group discount websites like Groupon and WeBuy and the dozens of similar websites.

Discount coupons have been around for decades – in the 80’s some of my friends’ mothers would cut out coupons from newspapers and magazines that offer discounted items or free samples. When the internet started, a few companies started it, but it never really caught on in the US until Groupon and Living Social popularized it in the scale we have today. Sometime in the mid of 2010, it really started to catch on in here in Malaysia. There have been a few of these sites (with a more or less the same concept) since as early as 2008 but they mostly failed to take off.

So anyway, I’ve somehow never got round to joining any of these sites until recently. I dunno, my idea is that the less you see these deals (however cheap they may be) the less you’ll spend in the long run. But out of curiousity, i did a survey of some of the sites, and finally signed up with Groupon Malaysia and MilkaDeal. Most of the others don’t seem to stand out, after awhile you tend to see the same deals repeated ad nauseam – Car polishing/waxing, spa treatment, facial treatment, dancing classes, etc.

And i bought my first coupon yesterday. It’s food, what else? 🙂