Off topic, but this reminds me very much of being put up in a hotel by the airline Avianca when they oversold a flight I was checking in for, meaning I had to take a different flight the next morning.

We were told that dinner would be provided, and given a coupon for the hotel's restaurant. Upon presenting said coupon prior to being seated, we were greeted with a look that I can only describe as 'oh, I see' - promptly seated at the absolutely worst table in the place, and given a 'special menu' with one or two very plain options (think, chicken with vegetables and a plain sauce) in an otherwise very nice-looking restaurant. We were summarily ignored for a very long time before our order was collected, and when the food was served it was sort of plonked down with no ceremony or pleasantries.

It's an awful experience to be treated this way, as a second class customer. As though you've broken a social contract by being allowed in through some hack, and the staff will 'serve' you to the absolute letter of the definition and no further. Almost pointedly so as though to emphasise how unhappy they are with your presence.

I never used groupon for a restaurant, but I can completely see that something like this might happen and understand why you never went back!

I had a similar experience in Stockholm, and the restaurant wouldn't even serve us a standard beer, only low-alcohol beer. I'd rather had paid the difference for the real stuff, but they didn't even give us the option.

Yeah, this was one of my increasing issues. As soon as word got around that lots of businesses were taking a bath because they weren't getting repeat customers, or the expected alcohol sales to make up the difference, etc. because hey, shocker, Groupon purchasers were looking for low-cost deals, they started with this approach.

Groupon then became a way to drum up business when things were slow while still hopefully making some margin on them by using the cheapest ingredients, smaller portions, offering a less costly (ie. higher margin) experience, etc.

Ended up leaving a bad taste in the customers' mouth almost guaranteeing they wouldn't return.

I guess we're a bit off topic, but I look at Massdrop as a curated list of competitively priced items. I agree they're pricing isn't rock bottom, though they imply it, however, I still think it's a great service because it's always a good price and generally a good product.

How does this set it aside from Amazon, aside from "generally a good product"? Massdrop marketing seems to be all about the pricing when in reality its just a curated list of (ostensibly) good products.

Massdrop's keyboard section typically sets it apart from Amazon. Not sure about other categories on the website.

Mass drop sells DIY kits to build ergodox keyboards which you typically can't buy anywhere else. Additionally they just arranged a production (with a lot of help from a Redditor) of custom key caps (Triumph GMK Adler https://www.massdrop.com/buy/triumph-adler-gmk-keyset).

Edit: just remembered I looked at buying headphones from Massdrop once. The starting price for the group buy was MSRP and the final unlocked price was the same as on Amazon. This definitely mirrors what others are saying.

In my experience I have also had mixed results buying non-keyboard related items on massdrop, but the keyboard things I've bought where excellent and at great prices.

Well for one thing there's often stuff on Massdrop that you can't get from Amazon. If the item is on Amazon it's generally about the same price, but I've definitely picked up things from Massrdrop that aren't on Amazon for a much better price than I found anywhere else. But yeah, I see it as a curated list of good products with the occasional deal.