Groupon must be destroyed.

Today we hit our deal-criteria trifecta! That means today’s product satisfies all three of the possible reasons we might run something:

1. It’s a reasonably useful product. Yeah, it’s not only a car charger for anything that charges via USB, but it can do a bunch of other stuff for Android phones: play music, scroll through apps, make calls, set up your favorite in-car apps to launch automatically when you plug it in, set up an autoreply message for calls or texts you get while you’re driving, and even remember, dude, where you parked your car. Not bad.

2. We can get it so cheap, the price alone makes it worth considering. Four bucks. That’s pretty good for any decent car charger, much less one that can do all of the above for Androids.

3. It helps us kill Groupon. Because fuck those creeps, on the real. Through the sheer dumb force of advertising, they’ve convinced millions of unsavvy shoppers that Groupon is the place to go for deals. You know how much they sold this very charger for recently? $19. Nineteen dollars. One-nine.

Yes, mighty Groupon conned thousands of befuddled consumers into forking out nigh on a double-sawbuck for this thing - almost five times what we’re asking. Their wholesale price could only have been, at worst, a little more than what we paid. Our negotiators are good, but we have no illusion they’re that good.

Groupon is everything wrong with “daily deals”. And ecommerce. And the Internet. Including their copywriting. Especially their copywriting. If there are any good writers on their staff, it’s hard to tell when they only get 5 minutes to write each piece. When I tell someone what I do for a living and they say “Oh, like Groupon,” I calmly tell them that Groupon actually does a bastardized, joyless, terrible, terrible knockoff of the style that my friends and I invented. I restrain myself from driving a fork into their eyes. It isn’t easy, but I do.

Groupon’s still coasting on the fading cool of their one real innovation - selling coupons for local small businesses - which was nice for a while until every restaurant you love was suddenly overrun with whiny penny-pinchers who refused to acknowledge the fine print about drinks not being included.

And we haven’t even gotten to their cretinous soul-dead Super Bowl commercial about Tibet, or their “creative” pre-IPO accounting, or any of the dozen other grievances that, in a just world, would see Groupon’s offices leveled and the ground salted a la Carthage so that nothing could ever grow there again.

We would run this deal anyway, even if we lived in a beautiful world where Groupon never existed. But if our offering this for four dollars helps pull the scales from the eyes of some deluded Groupon shoppers, so much the better. Where does Groupon find so many idiots willing to pay such high prices and think they’re getting a deal?

No, seriously. Do you know where? Can you help us find some, too?