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A few negative online reviews early on can hurt a restaurant

• nathanyz 6y ago
  I think this holds true for anything where reviews are easily viewable and a common part of the buying process. I would bet you find a similar problem with Amazon products that can get sunk by just a few negative reviews early on.
  • TwoBit 6y ago
    That would explain why a lot of new Chinese clone products start out the gate with 5-10 obviously fake five star reviews.
    • Animats 6y ago
      Yes. Search "Medical mask" on Amazon. Lots of vague, enthusiastic 5-star reviews. Then read the 1-star reviews: Link advertised as Medical Grade, CDC approved, CE certified but the box that the mask came in didn't have ANY of the advertised verbiage. On top of that, box had had non-sterile printed & non-CE (non certified). FRAUD advertisement!! Ordered these believing they were medical masks as described on this page. What I received was clearly labeled "Non-Medical Masks" and had a different part number than the number listed here. Ad said masks were made in USA. They are made in China. I bought a medical mask and when opening the package it says NON-MEDICAL-MASK I ordered these, because they said they were FDA approved. I received a different brand that is not. Only the 1-star reviews matter.
• keiferski 6y ago
  The main issue with review sites, in my experience, is that I end up being hesitant to try new restaurants which don’t have a large number of reviews or even one really bad review. They may be delicious but there is always a hesitation factor; “Do I want to spend $20 and risk the food being awful, or do I want to go with the safe option, the place I’ve been to a hundred times?” This problem didn’t really exist prior to review sites, but somehow I don’t remember being all that bothered by it. It makes me think: new restaurants would benefit from a sort of insurance program. I would be willing to try far more new restaurants if I had a guaranteed way to receive my money back in the event of disappointment. Just like insurance, the less times I use my refund, the lower rate I pay per month. /just a thought.
  • ysavir 6y ago
    As a thought experiment, do you have the same reaction when considering visiting a new restaurant in person?
    • keiferski 6y ago
      I think so, yeah. I’ve often walked by a new restaurant and thought, “That looks interesting” but then end up looking at the reviews before I decide to eat there.
  • amelius 6y ago
    > Just like insurance, the less times I use my refund, the lower rate I pay per month. Then the problem shifts to: do I want to risk my no-claim discount, or do I want to go with the safe option?
    • keiferski 6y ago
      Sure but presumably the restaurants would be vetted in some way to minimize negative experiences, and the likelihood of you wanting to use your discount fairly low. I’m not familiar with insurance companies but I imagine this is precisely their business model: minimize the likelihood of a claim but make the benefit of doing so worth it for the consumer to pay a monthly fee.
      • vharuck 6y ago
        As far as I can tell, insurance only makes sense if the cost of the insured event would ruin you. Otherwise, you're better off just setting aside some cash into a savings account and calling it your insurance fund. Insurers will always set premiums so that you're on the losing side of probability. Their real product is protecting you from the damage of going negative.
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• cutenewt 6y ago
  There are so many fake or manipulated reviews across all sites -- Yelp, Amazon, Uber, eBay -- that I just don't trust them anymore. Unfortunately, we are addicted to having someone filter products and services for us, even if they are manipulated. I'm dying for an alternative to the 5-star review, but seems like there's no end in sight.
  • superhuzza 6y ago
    >I'm dying for an alternative to the 5-star review Trusted source, e.g. particular friends/family/reviewers. I've had far better experiences trusting one knowledgeable person than 100s of anonymous reviewers.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      It would honestly be so nice to just rate a bunch of restaurants (or anything, music would be really nice) and have it spit out recommendations like “people with really similar taste to yours also like x,y,z”
      • splonk 6y ago
        This was literally the rationale behind the relaunch of reviews in Google Maps in 2010-11, and what you describe was exactly the internal demo that got the project staffed and funded. I'm not sure how much of it still exists, but for a while, when searching on maps, there were little tags on recommended places that said something like "recommended because people like you also liked X". That project never really reached its full potential for other reasons, but it turns out that even with a lot of data, it's hard to make big gains in ranking over just using the aggregate of all users. The intersection of two people's tastes is sort of surprisingly not very helpful.
        • awslattery 6y ago
          It's present for me as a % match to a restaurant I'm a regular at back home. Signals I have seen in this are menu item similarity, photo count by similar reviewers, and more basic metadata. It didn't really translate well to visiting Japan, but does great when in a new metro and not having any personal recommendations to go off.
• Havoc 6y ago
  And that can happen quite easily. e.g. A work team went out for an event and got genuinely atrocious service. i.e. Legitimately worthy of a 1 star review. Fair. Shit service, shit review. ...except somehow they hyped each other up to ALL do so. So that party of 20 left 20 bad reviews. I wasn't part of that but when I heard about it I couldn't help but think about this effect. One table having a bad time (happens) might have just killed an entrepreneurs dream. :(
  • aspaceman 6y ago
    That is a brutal and amazingly petty thing to do. I would stay far, far away from whoever got folks to do that. They sound cruel.
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    • richbradshaw 6y ago
      I’d guess they don’t really realise the impact it has.
      • IsopropylMalbec 6y ago
        What would be the point of a review if it had zero impact?
        • whymauri 6y ago
          Certainly there's a mid-point between 'zero impact' and business-crippling.
    • nikanj 6y ago
      They served 20 people poorly and got 20 bad reviews. How is that brutal or petty?
      • oehpr 6y ago
• Nasrudith 6y ago
  Dumb question - what if the early resturants with early bad reviews are simply bad and death spiral? I didn't see efforts to narrow down actual quality. Granted would require controlled attempts of opening under different names at different locations to try to see if a somewhat random starting review really drives it or confidental information from a chain resturant's attempts to expand by the same leadership.
• Traster 6y ago
  What I'm not getting about this is how you check cause and effect. How do you know bad reviews cause restaurants to stagnate? Call me crazy, but maybe restaurants stagnate is because they're bad. They also get bad reviews because they're bad and people might not go to the restaurant becaues it's bad. There's no explanation in this article of how this is overcome. Also, they're talking about 0-4 reviews and 5-10 reviews. I could imagine that's the sort of number of reviews that restaurants' family and friends could be leaving when a restaurant opens.
  • readme 6y ago
    Have you ever worked in a restaurant? I've worked in multiple. There's a reason Karen is a meme There are a real lot of very entitled people in the world that will complain on review sites and their opinion is not really justified. The only barrier is having an account and picking a number of stars. In the past you had to be a restaurant reviewer, like you worked for Zagat or something, so there was a barrier to entry. The same thing can happen to Uber and Lyft drivers too... If you are very unlucky and your first ride gives you a bad review pretty much forget about it.
    • recursive 6y ago
      Have you ever eaten at a restaurant? Bad food and bad service are a thing too. I'm not one to complain or make a scene, but if I have a bad time, I'm just not going to come back.
      • jchw 6y ago
        I may speak for myself but the grand majority of my experiences with restaurants is most of them do a totally passable job, many very good for their price point in my opinion. Of course there’s levels to it but its food and having a decent restaurant should be far from herculean. This article is essentially suggesting that making it in the world of restaurants is like anything else: it hinges a lot on luck and circumstance. And as an additional personal note, I can tell you that in Michigan I went to many smaller restaurants with one or two bad reviews that were great. If you actually read the bad reviews, you often see some utterly ridiculous shit.
• AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  It's kinda hard to tell from the article whether "negative" means one-star or, like, three-stars. Because yeah, there are quite a few people who tend to overreact to a less-than-ideal experience where they feel compelled to leave a one-star review because the check took an extra ten minutes to arrive. And surely anyone with a shred of empathy would cut a brand new restaurant some slack if it's not perfect on the first week. OTOH, people seem to think you're being mean if you leave a 2-3/5 review for a restaurant, and at some point we should acknowledge the fact that some places are just mediocre. And if I go to a thoroughly mediocre Italian restaurant, I don't think it's mean to leave it a mediocre rating, because the average person should know that there are four better Italian restaurants within 15 miles they could go to.
  • splonk 6y ago
    5-star rating distributions are heavily bipolar - maybe like 80% of ratings will be 1 or 5. This is part of why some systems end up switching to thumbs up/down. I don't like it much, but empirically, it's how people seem to use rating scales. I semi-joke with friends that I wreck the ratings of things just because I try to use the entire scale, so my 4 star "pretty darn good!" rating actually ends up lowering the average.
    • rocqua 6y ago
      Back when I looked at the netflix challenge, the baseline above which improvement was barely possible was: Per person find their average rating, and score movies not by ratings, but by how far the rating deviated from that person's average. I think that approach got me to 92% accuracy. More advanced math gave me like another 2 percent, with the winner of the challenge having gotten 96% accuracy. My point being. A very basic recommendation engine system should correct for your 4star is pretty good habit.
      • splonk 6y ago
        Agree that it's very simple to do some basic corrections from individual distributions. I just think it's relatively rare to see any of this in the wild (and when it's there, there's often pushback from people complaining about the process).
• MiddleWinger 6y ago
  This does not apply to restaurants in small towns.
• dutch3000 6y ago
  you don’t say
• annaaix 6y ago
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• croissants 6y ago
  Since we're talking about it, my usual method for finding restaurants in new places is to ask people and then go to online discussion forums. Some cities have specific ones, like LTH Forum for Chicago. If not, I visit more general food forums like Hungry Onion. Chowhound used to be a great resource for this, but they got bought or something and the community withered. A lot of them moved to Hungry Onion. I also have a few bloggers I follow. Ulterior Epicure is a good name if you're interested in "high-end" food. The guy is not a "collector" like a lot of restaurant bloggers, which I like. That combination is usually enough to get a list of interesting-looking places. Yelp tends to just not have much information in my experience.
  • splonk 6y ago
    For California, it seems like the SF Bay Area Chowhound refugees went to Hungry Onion, but the LA people went to Food Talk Central. It's pretty unfortunate, since CH really was a good resource back in the day, and now neither site seems to have critical mass. These days (well, not the past couple months) I tend to get more recommendations from industry people. I sit at a lot of restaurant bars and a server who isn't too busy is usually happy to chat. As a bonus, I get way more than my fair share of free drinks and tastes of interesting things.
• dilandau 6y ago
  To one who understands complex systems theory, this is completely unsurprising. All the emergent phenomena (fake reviews, pandering to Instagram, faux-chic, aspirational minimalism) in turn create more reaction, more phenomena. If we ask ourselves: were online reviews a good thing? To me clearly no. Authenticity has been the price.
• sbassi 6y ago
  Brace for GPT-3 based reviews.
• nomad543 6y ago
  Public reviews should be outlawed unless some form of credential system is created. The review system is another example of how the tech industry is unable control their urge to inconsequentially behave like if they were gods with complete lack of empathy.
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  I have always wanted to give a restaurant an anonymous “tip” instead of a public review. Like privately: “hey, we love you guys, just FYI the croissants have seemed stale lately. Just wanted you guys to know...” My hypothesis is most just nod and always say everything is “fine” if prompted for feedback. But you’d get more honest feedback if there was a way to privately “drop a line” to your favorite restaurants. (I hate writing reviews. I know even minor negative feedback will have a bad impact on someone’s personal business.)
  • andreareina 6y ago
    Tell the staff, or better yet ask to see the manager and tell them.
• raz32dust 6y ago
  Of course bad reviews can hurt a restaurant. That's what reviews are for. I think the problem is two-fold: 1. The ranking algorithm is bad. A simple average is very naive, but many site use just that for ranking. There needs to be some standard accredited algorithms to do rating rankings - which take care of factors like this. 2. Online marketplace makes a wider variety available to users. This automatically ensures that more and more sales go to the highest quality restaurants. If there is a 5-star restaurant you can order from, why would you try a 4.8-star one? There can only be a few "best" restaurants, and everyone wants to eat their food.
• umvi 6y ago
  Just like a few early downvotes can hurt a comment (at least on reddit). Now maybe the comment really is poor quality, but sometimes it's a really clever joke that goes over the initial downvoters' heads
• mkhalil 6y ago
  Create two restaurants with the same exact look, menu, appliances and prep but different names and Yelp/Google entities. Enter bad reviews in one, and see what happens. That's how we would be able to tell if its the reviews or the restaurant that hurt the restaurant. An aside: With this mesh of human and company rights [whether or not you agree], does a company -- like people + GDPR -- have the right to be forgotten, or not exist somewhere they wish not to?
  • slim 6y ago
    a company does not havr the right to be forgotten
• reagent_finder 6y ago
  Egg-and-chicken debates aside, I can absolutely see this. In any reasonably-sized town or city you'll find a dozen similar establishments a walking distance away. So while you might debate picking between the 3.5 and 4.5-star ones, the restaurant with 1-2 stars is just not going to draw a crowd.
• nabla9 6y ago
  New restaurants can change in quality very fast. They might start with everything being fresh and high quality ingredients, then when money is tight in one month the quality sinks either temporarily or permanently. Increasing popularity can also decrease quality. More people more work. If people start coming because restaurant has been discovered, quality matters less afterwards. It tastes good when everyone says it tastes good.
• habosa 6y ago
  If I was a restaurant starting up I’d just buy my first 20 reviews. Tell customers they get a free appetizer if they leave a review on Yelp (any review, any stars). Sucks that’s the world we live in but it’s so obviously true and it’s the best investment a new restaurant can make.
• omega3 6y ago
  I see the opposite happening as well where the high reviewed restaurants can ride the wave of popularity for a pretty long time whilst reducing the portio sizer, replacing free drinks with high margin ones, replacing more expensive ingredients with cheaper alternatives, increasing the wait times before the new lower reviews start to propagate.