Do online coupons—Groupon, Living Social, Dealpop—do restaurants more harm than good?

That’s the question that drove me to write this article. It just so happened that while I was writing it, Rice University came out with a study that surveyed 150 businesses that had used Groupon to spike sales.

I saw the results the morning after I had spoken with the media relations person at Groupon. She had mentioned that 96 percent of businesses said they would use the company again. I asked where that number came from, she said it was from Groupon’s own internal research. In the Rice study, however, 40 percent of those surveyed said they would not run another such promotion. Obviously these are two very different numbers.

In addition to interviews with local businesses—a lot of which didn’t end up in the article because of space—I also spoke with Maggie Savarino. She used to write for the Seattle Weekly but now works as a restaurant consultant. It was Savarino who got me thinking about this whole issue in the first place, via a Facebook status update comparing online coupons to payday loan companies. Restaurants are low-margin businesses to begin with. Add in a lame economy and there’s not much money being made even when they’re charging the full amount. Slice the prices in half, then, by introducing a coupon, and you have—to use the parlance of one orange-and-oily New Jersey native—a bit of a situation.