This mirrors somewhat my experience many years ago with bartering. The places that were bartering were doing so because it was some low hanging fruit way to increase business and it was easy to to. And they were places that weren't particularly popular on their own (restaurants let's say) so they would do bartering to bring in customers on Monday nights but not allow it for obvious reasons on Saturday or Friday night. There is always a feeling on the part of small business owners that barter dollars are not real dollars (even though there is value in many cases) and barter business is not real business. A place that isn't doing that well to begin with (and once again I realize this is a generalization that is not true in many cases) is not going to have the best employees or the best attitudes because they are running short on cash and can't pay the best wages or have the best working conditions. So it's an entire ecosystem of mediocrity that you (in your case or me in my case) might end up experiencing.

So I guess in theory someone taking groupon (or barter dollars) should just be a regular business that is doing well wanting to increase business. But in actual cases it might more often (from my experience at least) be a marginal business that is trying to fix a situation with marketing that isn't exactly going to work as planned by bringing in groupon dollars or barter dollars (that will end up being used by the owner to go out to dinner with his wife (and yes that is what happened)). Valuable things (in the case of barter dollars) that a business needs are not typically available with barter dollars. What you get is a bunch of things like dining, travel or accountants or attorneys (and how many of those do you need).