If I ever meet a nice girl and we settle down and start a family, I hope it’s with someone I met while enjoying $22 off Brazilian capoeira classes at New York Capoeira Center ($45 value), or $20 for $40 worth of Italian food and drinks at Manhattan’s East Side Social Club.
That’s because Groupon — the online “deal of the day” Web site that fills my inbox with coupons for anything from donuts to haircuts — will give our darling child $60,000.
That’s right, free cash. The only catch is I have to use it for the kid’s college fees. Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason made the strange offer at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week, according to Business Insider. The report says the $60,000 offer is actually a clever way to promote Groupon’s dating service, rather grossly called “Grouspawn.”
Grouspawn is a free service and it calls itself “the antidote for the poison of loneliness,” but what does the site get out setting me up on a date? Well, they’re hawking coupons to the sorts of places that could be date locations, and you have to use one on your first date (Grouspawn wants couples to provide some sort of proof that they did indeed meet on a Groupon date).
So I checked out the site. It notifies single Groupon users that they can cash in on the offer by using its “Date Assistant” feature, which offers a selection of “eligible hunks and she-hunks” for site users to contact. “They’re all real people,” the site hastens to add, although “Tess” in Chicago looks suspiciously like Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Marisa Miller. Still, she “likes Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain” (presumably, half-price Pina Coladas purchased with a Groupon).
Besides, for $60,000 she just might possibly be Ms. Right.