My Love/Hate Relationship with Yelp

Everyone knows Yelp! and have used to look for new places to eat at least once.

Having worked at a restaurant, I can see how businesses are at the mercy of sites like Yelp! This is more true for new businesses just starting out. If you're not pandering to the customers, they can make business life tough with threats to give your business a bad review. Some customers will ask for free stuff and threaten to write a bad review if you don't acquiesce to their wishes.

Here's a scenario that totally happened.

This is at a Chinese restaurant. Customer orders takeout. Our takeout containers have a clear plastic lid, so you can see the food that you ordered. Customer orders a bunch of things, picks up the box of 6 orders, pays for their food, and leave. They come back 20 minutes later claiming their "Orange Chicken" is missing. Our staff points out that the container at the top with the chicken is the "Orange Chicken."

"Oh, the one with the broccoli?"

"Yes, that's the one."

"Okay, then we have it."

30 seconds later, the wife or girlfriend of the first person comes back in demanding that we give her an "Orange Chicken" that was ordered, but "missing" in the box of food that they picked up.

"Are you going to give me another Orange Chicken or not?"

"Nope."

"Then you're going to get a bad review."

"Okay."

She storms off. Her friend already confirmed that they have the dish, but she was determined to get another free dish out of it.

I use Yelp! to find businesses for services, like barbers or painters or whatever. I don't really trust the reviews on restaurants quite as much because you have to really sift through the reviews to see whether they are reviewing the restaurant based on food or service or a combination of both or sometimes on something completely arbitrary.

Yelp! is a site that also has run into legal troubles with lawsuits from businesses claiming that they are semi-extorting them for ad revenue. The way it works is like this. You either pay for additional services so they hide the bad reviews or you don't and the bad reviews magically float to the top. It's quite a good racket. I am not sure they do that any more, but that's something to chew on.