Deals and discounts, compliments of your local government
By Ariel Barkhurst, Sun Sentinel, 1/16
South Florida cities are joining forces with businesses to use deals and discounts to reel shoppers — and their cash — into city boundaries.
The goal: Pump up the local economy. A side benefit for the resident-consumer: Deals at restaurants, stores and bars that aren’t too far from the front door.
Online coupons sent directly to mobile devices, a Groupon-style deal website and a reward card system are among the ways cities are using technology to bring in consumers.
“Whether it’s a community or guys out of their garage starting a website, there’re a lot of people starting on this bandwagon,” said Fred Johnson, a former investment banker who runs the South Florida deal site DealBuoy.com.
Delray Beach launched a free Wi-Fi network downtown in October that automatically displays coupons and deals for nearby businesses when someone logs on using a laptop, smartphone or tablet.
“Sometimes the deals are like blocks away, but if I see something right where I am, I’ll read it,” said Julia
Gentry, of Delray Beach, logged on Wi-Fi On The Ave at Atlantic Avenue’s Spot Coffee. “I checked it on purpose once when I was here with friends from out of town.”
One morning recently, a hungry shopper could get a deal on lunch at Café Luna Rose or the Atlantic Grille, so long as he had a mobile Wi-Fi device. Others lounging on the Avenue skip through the ads or log on at Starbucks. But the deals are there for those who want them, said Sarah Martin, executive director of Delray Beach’s Downtown Marketing Cooperative, a collaboration between the city and its Community Redevelopment Agency.
Plenty of people seem to want to browse. In October, the network’s first month in operation, 2,670 people logged on and clicked an average of 2.3 ads. In November, the most recent data available, 4,600 people logged on and clicked an average of 2.7 ads.
“You’re hungry, you log on, you see a deal for lunch for $10 at the Atlantic Grille, and you go,” said
David Daucanski, president of Boynton-Beach Blueweb Mobile Media, which set up Delray Beach’s Wi- Fi.
Other cities are trying to help businesses get deals to local consumers in other ways.
Pembroke Pines launched a website last October, ShopPembrokePines.com, where Pembroke Pinesonly businesses create web pages to upload coupons.
Consumers can register to get coupons automatically or browse the page’s sections: Gift Certificates, Deals, Menus and Reviews.
So far only 15 businesses have created accounts, said Pembroke Pines Economic Development Director Mike Stamm, but that’s in part because it takes time to process applications. The program is only getting started, Stamm said.
The aim is to offer discounts and information on local businesses, like a Groupon or LivingSocial-style site, in order to keep residents shopping local.
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“From the consumer standpoint, you save on gas at the gas station around the corner if you use the site,” Stamm said.
Sunrise has been working for months to afford a rewards card program in which cardholders would get automatic discounts from participating businesses in the city. It would take $487,000 to get the program going, though, so city leaders canceled it.
Mayor Mike Ryan said the program will come back before the commission soon, and he plans to push for it.
“It has two purposes,” he said. “One is to support our local businesses. The other is to give a little something to our residents who buy locally.”
Cities, especially in South Florida where it’s easy to slip into another town without knowing it, have always wanted residents to shop close to home, so the cash stays there and keeps the local economy healthy.
“Local businesses generate jobs locally,” Ryan said. “It’s beneficial for the city to have robust local businesses collecting businesses taxes. And when businesses are successful, it encourages other businesses and other growth.”
The concept behind Delray Beach’s Wi-Fi project was hatched by Blueweb, which also sets up such networks in large malls or sporting venues.
Blueweb is in talks to set up coupon-laden Wi-Fi on Las Olas Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale, in Coconut Grove and in Naples. Sarasota already has a system similar to Delray Beach’s.
Finding new and higher-tech ways of giving consumers deals and coupons is a craze in the business world, said Johnson of Dealbuoy.com.
And that could be a problem, said Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce CEO Dan Lindblade.
“We were looking at doing it ourselves, and there’s just so many deal sites out there,” Lindblade said.
“There’s so many ways to get deals already. We didn’t think we could compete.”
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try, though, if it doesn’t cost too many tax dollars, Lindblade said.
“It’s a good idea,” he said. “But everything’s in the execution.”