Marc Murphy, who owns four restaurants in New York, gets pitched by salespeople all the time. But these days most of them seem to be selling the same thing: online deal ploys.
“Everyone and their mother is walking in the door with discount sites,” he said. Still, Murphy was taken aback by a conversation he had on the subway not long ago when another passenger recognized him from a television appearance. As they talked, the stranger mentioned that a friend of his had started a website that sold coupons for dining out. “Then he started pitching it right there,” Murphy recalled with amazement. “How many more of these can there be?”
With more than a dozen deal sites born each week, there is no end in sight. Groupon, BlackboardEats, VillageVines and hundreds of other deal sites are hurling sales-force cadres at restaurant managers. The newbie sites join the venerable Restaurant.com as well as Open Table, Yelp, LivingSocial, Gilt City, DailyCandy, Thrillist and a host of others. Mike Scotese, an owner of the Grey Lodge Pub in Philadelphia, said he has rejected “15 different Groupon clones.”