Group buying makes me think of supersizing McDonald's meals. You think it's a bargain, more for less, and then you die of a heart attack.

But the thing is the domestically developed business model, known in Chinese as tuangou, is a huge deal and the idea has spawned about 1,000 group buying website operators in the past year.

It works like this on goutuan.net: Click on to the Web page and browse for goods that are offered at a heavy discount. For example, a meal for four that would usually cost about 256 yuan ($39) is offered for just 98 yuan.

This applies for a given time period, displayed as a type of clock counting down to zero. When the time runs out the deal is off. If enough people go for it, you get your bargain, whether it's for bras, children's toys or cosmetics.

Most people pay through a domestic version of Paypal, such as online retailer Taobao's Alipay. This, in turn, is fed by the purchaser's online bank account, thus providing security and ease of payment.

It's a smart way of shopping as it allows masses of Internet users to group together and buy products at retail cost. The vendor profits by selling in bulk. Win-win.

This helps explain the desire of US company Groupon to muscle in on the China market. The "deal-of-the-day" operator, with about 35 million registered users, has a similar kind of business model and is one of the fastest growing companies on the planet.

Through its gaopeng.com website, it aims to offer customers in Beijing and Shanghai discounts at shops via daily e-mails, before expanding further. It has teamed up with the popular Web portal Tencent to achieve this.

However, this local connection did not prevent it from revealing a total lack of understanding of the market and disturbing arrogance when it ran a tasteless ad during Super Bowl XLV about Tibet - which inevitably stirred nationalist sentiment here and a backlash.

Then, it went online on Feb 15 without informing Tencent. The two companies had a shouting match and the site was closed 24 hours later. It was back up on Monday.

Whether the seemingly incompetent Groupon eventually succeeds in an intensely competitive market is neither here nor there to me. I'm more interested in the people who are group buying or deal-of-the-day customers. The majority are young, professional urban women - those who you might expect to have an eye for a bargain.

While some are no doubt just being careful with their money and shopping around, many others don't seem to care so much what they buy as long as it is a bargain. This is not buying out of necessity; it's buying for the sake of it. And it's addictive.

Not only that but also the actual outcome is often shoddy goods, and deals at restaurants, hair salons and suchlike that offer substandard meals and poor service.

While this may be good for the consumer economy, it could be argued that greed and too much money is at the bottom of it. It's like overeating, and the outcome is more waste, unhealthy and unhappy fat people.

I guess one solution is to work harder, earn more and group buy fitness equipment or gym memberships. I realize this is only business as usual, but it looks like a vicious circle to me. Sometimes, more is less.