Imagine the business had started this way: You have lots of friends who like to do the kind of stuff they're promoting. You have some guy in the group who is willing to call around and bargain. We'll fill 10 tables @ 4pm tomorrow if you give us the free appetizers & desert. Then he decides to create a scalable process for this kind of bargaining to happen. That might look similar to the business they're building here.

That's a much broader net than this specific issue.

Run of the mill coupon websites have been associating businesses with coupon/discount verbiage for a long time, some even profitably.

To be clear, where do you stand on verbiage such as "If x people vote to request a 50% off coupon at Premium Brand, we will talk to Premium Brand."

Personally I have no problem with this - it may screw up the premium brand when it comes to SEO but that is Team Google's problem to improve search quality.