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Groupon Not Doing So Well On Wall Street
bdking writes "Shares of the daily-deals site were up Tuesday, but Groupon's ride on Wall Street since going public in early November has been almost all downhill. And there's no evident catalyst to reverse the slide."
From the looks of it, Groupon is blowing all of its money attempting to expand in the face of ever-growing competition in a market with trivial start-up costs.
Groupon is dumping VC money directly to the founder's pockets and screwing the businesses that participate. That combination will result in failure.
it's basically a ponzi scheme.
Nope, not even close.
The situation is analogous to "begs the question". "begs the question" has a technical very specific philosophical meaning but in modern prose it almost exclusively means "Insert wordy semi-scholastic filler phrase here". Also see "price point" instead of "price", etc etc. Hell, see "etc" too.
In modern American speech, "ponzi scheme" is a semi-scholastic phrase meaning "it sucks" or "I don't like it" or "they're crooks". It does have a real technical meaning and describes a criminal activity which has nothing at all to do with your explanation in any form. Ironically (irony is another often re-imagined word) their sales/finance strategy is vaguely ponzi like, in the sense that all corporate sales/finance strategies are when they reinvest any profits in the company, but not really, not in a criminal sense anyway, and certainly not in the market explanation you provided.
I can't think of a way to run a ponzi in/over/with a market like you describe... maybe a boiler room operation cooperating with false price quotes could pull it off?
Note that I'm not defending them; they appear based on lots of journalist stories to have published fraudulent financial data. That would make them frauds, not ponzi operators. I'm just saying it does no one on either side, any good, to describe a bank robber as a kidnapper, or describe a horse thief as a murderer.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
no. it means you pay out the early suckers with new suckers money. that is the definition of a ponzi scheme. when you run out of new suckers the whole thing breaks down.
Speak for yourself.