- April 12, 2011 • 4:00 am PDT
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It seems like a new daily deal site comes online just about every week, promising you 50 percent off of anything you can swipe a credit card at. All kinds of copycats are chasing Groupon's $15 billion tail. But getting discounts doesn't have to be all about teeth whitening and tapas.
The daily deal model can be a force for positive change, by sending a message about the buying power of conscious consumers, or as Blissmo is trying to do (see next slide), changing our buying habits for the better.
As we pointed out earlier, Groupon evolved out of a do-gooding platform before ballooning into the fastest growing company of all time. It has all but left that behind, and even inexplicably chose to mock nonprofits in Super Bowl ads. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Another mainstream deal site, Living Social proved these platforms can be used for giving as well as buying when it raised—and matched!—more than a million dollars in donations for tsunami relief in Japan.
And then there are the sites with social and environmental consciousness built in to the deals and the companies behind them. Here are four daily deal sites that are better (for the world) than Groupon, so you can have your discount and support your values too.
