Krunch went Yelp
A small little wine school in Chicago is getting a whole lot of attention. Master Sommelier (and runner up in the International Silly Name Contest) Krunch Kretschmar has unwittingly discovered how to build a virtual nuclear warhead with nothing but social media.
Krunch owns Bottled Grapes, a tiny wine school in Chicago. He recently opted to do a Groupon promotion. That alone was a bit crazy, since there is a growing amount of proof that a poorly conceived Groupon promotion can bankrupt a small businesses. For his Groupon, he sold $35 tickets for $17.50 each. Since Groupon takes 50% of the revenue of each sale, that means Krunch earned $8.75 per ticket. At that price, he was loosing money for every groupon sold, and there was over three thousand of these deals sold. Since he only offers an average of four classes a month, he was looking at loosing money for a few years. That sucks, big time.
Add to the mix a Yelper. Yelp is a powerful thing. Yelp and it’s aggregated reviews are widely trusted as a barometer of quality. Large businesses will have hundreds of reviews, so a single review won’t affect them. However, a single bad review can cause major damage to business with less than ten reviews, thousands of dollars of lost sales to a small company. That is the type of power that should be handled carefully and gently. Unfortunately, the power of Yelp is largely wielded by the most callous groups in America: affluent white twenty-somethings.
So, the Yelper in question, Cecelia Groark, bought a Groupon. She didn’t like the customer support she received, so she left a scathing Yelp review. If facing bankruptcy via Groupon wasn’t enough, now Krunch’s reputation was tarnished, too. Yelp plus Groupon is a volatile mix, that’s for sure: it can implode a business in a few short months.
What turned this from a sad tale to a nuclear chain reaction was Krunch himself. He figured out the identity of the Yelper, and engaged in the type of payback every small business owner dreams of, but never does: he struck back. He created a blog under her name, and according to the Chicago Sun-Times he “accused her of ‘embezzling’ from her employer, of having a drug addiction and of “turning to the oldest profession to gain funds need[ed] to support her habits.”
Unfortunately for Krunch, he seems to be something of a dumbass. After creating the blog (which included her cell phone number), he emailed a link to Ms. Groark. Now he is facing a half million dollar lawsuit. Oh, and dozens of other Yelpers are trashing his reputation. While Krunch “I hope to God your middle name isn’t Kris” Kretschmar is not much of a protagonist, this is one of those stories that every small business owner should take notice of.
The deal with the Groupon sale was for $35 you could come to one of his tastings. He, in his own words on a video on his website Bottled Grapes, states that he sold 4000 tickets between Groupon and Living Social. $35 times 4000 = $140,000
Krunch received immediately from Groupon (presumably) $70,000
From Krunche’s own lips…….
LINK: http://bottledgrapesonline.com/index.php?vid=11
This guy is a con man. All of his credentials are fake. We checked them all out. Now as a result of this implosion
others are checking him out.
He tried to con us out of wine. We lost a few thousand but we were never taken in. Speaking to Costco, they fired him; the Store chain Potash fired him. He was a clerk. Not a Sommelier. No Harvard Grad. No Rothschild connection. They do not even give out titles.
Richard Wallace
That is the other side of the coin. Our topic was the Groupon/Yelp dynamic, and really didn’t touch on the possibility of KK being a con artist.
On another note, what’s up with Wallace’s being in the wine trade? I know a dozen or so. Is it a Scottish thing?
Check this link out…..http://chicagoist.com/2012/01/18/dont_buy_wine_from_a_guy_named_krun.php