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Clark Behind The Headlines

From HLN's Money Expert Clark Howard

Well, my wife and I are very, very embarrassed. We bought a Groupon that we let expire before we used it!

Now, Groupon, if you're not familiar with it, is something that I've raved about, as well as a competitor of theirs called Living Social. For dozens of cities around the country, these sites offer a deal a day. Sometimes the deals are things you're very interested in. Other times, it’s a ho-hum yawner.

But you buy the deal, and then you have a window - in many cases it's a year, sometimes two or three months - to use it. You might get $30 worth of something for $10, or $50 for $25, or whatever it is. They are very, very decent discounts.

But there’s a third competitor in the marketplace called Scout Mob. It’s now in 13 cities around the country. Let me name the cities they're in: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Springfield, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta, Boston, New York and Washington D-C.

And the way it works is, you sign up, pick your city and you’ll start getting emails or texts with the daily deal. If you want the coupon, they send it by email or text. You don't pay money until you go to redeem the discount. It’s really, really simply done.

Ultimately, the test for the businesses that participate will be: do they get the sell-through numbers they’re looking for with Scout Mob? But Scout Mob gives you a no-risk way to get the kind of discount I'm used to with Living Social and Groupon.

I used a Groupon recently at a restaurant, and I was the first person the restaurant had ever had that used the new Groupon app. All I had to do was hold up the screen on my iPod Touch, and they just scanned it right from the screen for the redemption of the coupon. So you don't even have to worry about holding onto a piece of paper.

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