Sabkush Headlines: Daily deals: Theyre taking over your town

Sabkush Headlines: Daily deals: Theyre taking over your town

Daily deals: Theyre taking over your town

Theres a scene in the 1989 comedy "Troop Beverly Hills" in which rival bands of Wilderness Girls attempt to best one another in a fundraiser by selling boxes of the same cookies to the households of a single upper-crust neighborhood--and unfortunately for the underdog protagonists, their arch-enemies have beaten them to the punch at just about every house. Thats what it may soon look like for the explosion of companies offering ultra-discounted, fire-sale daily deals for local businesses, which have fast become the Webs latest retail craze. Heres how it works. Youll sign up for an online newsletter that will advertise a different deal every day: a coupon for $10 for a bikram yoga lesson that usually goes for $25, $15 for a $30 tour of historic New York pizzerias (slices not included), or $25 for $50 worth of organic grocery delivery. The catch is that either theres a very limited number of "deals" available, or more likely, the service follows a "group buying" model in which a certain number of people need to opt in before any of them get it. Taking a cue from geek favorite Woot, which offered a single item for sale each day in a limited quantity, the model was exposed to new demographics when luxury sample sale outlets like Gilt and Ideeli debuted, and has now moved on to a market that the digital advertising industry has long hoped to capture: independent local businesses. Even though theres a clear market leader in Groupon--which has raised a notable amount of funding, declared that its profitable, and swelled to over 30 local editions--rival city-specific daily deals newsletters are absolutely everywhere.