Well, that was exciting

In my last post I mentioned our Living Social online deal, which ran on Thursday. The Living Social website has a counter that shows in real time how many vouchers have been sold as the 24-hour window elapses. I happened to be awake shortly after the deal went live, so I checked how it was doing, and I was surprised that four vouchers had been bought in the first half hour, since that was 5:30 am. Then again, I am never clear on what goes on in the waking world at that hour, so I went back to sleep, like normal human beings should do at that time of morning (night).

A few hours later, the number was in the triple digits and growing very quickly. I spent at least 15 minutes sitting at my computer and refreshing my webpage every five seconds to see how many more had been bought. In fact, I called Jill (who was at work) and we engaged in this activity together over the phone for a while, getting a little giddy.

By around 11 am, when I showed up at Generous Servings, the number was at 300. We placed bets on how much higher it would go in the next 18 hours, but by early afternoon our bets were all surpassed, so we had to place new bets. It turns out that Susan's bet (the highest of all of them) was the closest (she always wins everything! It's not fair!). She bet 700. Here's the final screen showing the total:

Yup, 702 vouchers. That's a lot of customers an 18-seat restaurant. So if you are one of our new favorite people, call for reservations!

Do you ever wonder how these deals work for the merchant? Me too, and now I know the terms of the major players. Their agreements are labeled "confidential", which strikes me as rather self-important. I'm going to stamp "confidential" on all of my correspondence from now on. In fact, this blog post is confidential. We all know that it's silly to post things online that you could get in trouble for, though.

Yesterday someone passed a counterfeit $50 bill in Après. This is the second counterfeit bill we've gotten at Generous Servings (that we know of). Prior to that, I didn't even think counterfeiting was real; I thought it was a convenient device in caper movies to finance the clever schemes. In case it's ALSO real that there is that one nerdy technophile thief on the team who can hack into the power grid and might be reading this blog: we got a counterfeit-detection marker, so tell the rogue team leader, the safe-cracker/runway model, and the explosives expert dude to leave us alone.