A few negative online reviews early on can hurt a restaurant
news.osu.edu
news.osu.edu
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.
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.
I personally don’t go online and immediately sort by restaurants with 1 or 2 stars. I tend to sort by those with higher ratings.
Fake bad reviews by competitors and mean spirited people do know their actions have an affect on that business.
That's not the question that others are referring to. Everyone agrees that bad reviews affect the popularity.
The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". Yes, initial bad reviews are likely to affect the number of total reviews a restaurant receives. But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews. The press release says that the ratings of the initial reviews determines (causes) the total number of reviews and hence the eventual popularity of the restaurant, but doesn't explain how the researchers eliminated the apparently obvious alternative causal explanation that bad restaurants are more likely to get initial bad reviews, leading to fewer total reviews.
One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/23754931.2020.179...
The paper: As the number of reviews is statistically significant and positive in all of the regression models, the more reviews a restaurant receives, the higher rating it has.
A helpful move for new establishments—especially independent ones which don't have the organizing strategies of large corporations—would be to delay allowing comments for 3–6 months. I've worked in food for a long time, still do, and it's so difficult to have all aspects of an establishment in a good place at the outset. Give restaurants the time to work out those kinks before accepting comments.
The question was - how do they know it's the bad reviews that hurt the restaurants, or if it's actually the bad service (which caused the bad reviews) that hurts the restaurants.
They observe an effect - hurt restaurant - they see bad reviews - they blame the bad reviews. But was it actually the bad service (evident from the bad reviews) which hurt the restaurant?
The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.
I think the only possible thing is “what does the market think.” So the entire problem is correlation.
“Bad service” is, literally by definition, the name we give after the fact to types of service that correlated with bad reviews and low revenue.
at a minimum, the health department disagrees, re cooking and delivering food.
Once we went to a restaurant with hardly any diners, not at all busy. We ordered dinner. They served half our order. We waited for the other half. After about half an hour, we asked the manager. He went to investigate, and came back with the admission that they had forgotten to submit the other half of our order to the kitchen.
That's objectively bad service. I don't see how anyone could see that as "great service".
Now, maybe it was just an innocent mistake, someone having a bad day, and maybe the manager is really apologetic and offers some compensation and I forgive them. It would rule them out of consideration for a five star review, but I wouldn't give them one star just for that. Unless, if I had gone on a review site and saw a dozen other people complaining about the same restaurant messing up their order, then I probably would have left a one star review too.
But more often than not I go to a place that is rated very good but is actually not that good. And usually the bad rated places are indeed bad.
She finally admitted to me that it gets on her nerves greatly and she resents all of it. It came as quite a shock to me (because I find I lot of it funny) but I suspect there are a lot of Karens out there that aren't amused.
The kiddos and I have now resorted to calling her "K-Dog" which she gets a kick out of.
So, I’d say the same applies. If people called Karen don’t like the new association with their name, they can change their name.
Otherwise, sticks and stones.
Also, they’re not the ones actually being mocked here - I get grief from grown-ass adults over my name, directed at me - so frankly, I think anyone named Karen who sees this as a personal attack needs to either get over it, or change their name.
I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.
I'm aware that John is an Americanism for the bog (toilet/WC.) John Doe is a person whose name is unknown in the US. A rubber johnny is just one nickname for a prophylactic. My mum used to call me Jonny or Johann or even Johannes as a sign of affection.
I'm not so sure that Karens are offended by the term Karen. You see, very few Karens are actually Karens.
People didn't start calling a toilet Jon because they wanted a label for the sterotype of an entitled asshole.
I guess its a form of virtue signaling. You have to be cool and know meems to know what calling somebody a Karen even means.
Should every possible characteristic a living entity can have also be a protected class?
The whole political correctness idea isn't internally consistent anyway so you can't expect new concepts or words to be "correctly" fitted into it. It's just an arbitrary political ideology for people to latch onto.
I do feel like we shouldn't attach that to a real name that real people have, but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole" that convey the same meaning without lumping in unrelated people who so happen to share the name who have done nothing bad to anyone.
I always think "douchebag" is quite good for this. You can really pile quite a lot of emphasis onto that first syllable for maximal invective effect.
The origin of "dick" is, nevertheless, the name "Dick". Would you be satisfied if we went from "Karen" to "karen"?
I'm truly astonished when I see businesses with 0-4 reviews on Yelp or Google Maps, but they're everywhere. Maybe some business owners just aren't paying any attention to online reviews? Seems trivial to get 4 people to write a review.
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. :(
Say you have a bad day at work but usually you’re awesome. This happens to be the day 20 new coworkers see you for the first time. They all tell their manager.
Do you deserve to be ostracized forever because you bombed one presentation to a vocal minority? Or should that be balanced against your amazing work on other days?
The Algorithm just sees those 20 bad reviews. It doesn’t know about your other amazing days.
In the case of a restaurant another dimension comes into play: Serving a table of 20 is a logistical nightmare compared to serving 10 tables of 2. This is why large parties usually call in advance and get a prefixed menu. The restaurant would also ensure extra staffing for that time.
When you go to the reviews section, your perception is that these reviews are uncorrelated. Correlated reviews are less meaningful, they provide less data. Most people arriving at a review section, seeing 20 1 star ratings, would presume ratings were independent individuals. If 20 independent reviewers each had a bad experiences. That amount of data is extremely telling of the service.
1 singular review, on the other hand says much less.
Maybe their waiter was bad and was fired later? Maybe that was a bad day for the kitchen or the staff somehow? Maybe the reviewer came in with a negative expectation and was biased somehow. Maybe there was some kind of culture issue?
Reviews arn't measurements, they're fuzzy. And while a party agreeing that they were not treated well is MORE information than a single person, it is no where near the signal strength of 20 individual samples.
In this way. They had significantly more influence than was due. It wasn't fair.
So one bad employee can cripple a restaurant because of a dumb algorithm? Lets start by saying the right thing to do would be talk to the manager first and get them to resolve it.
I hope you see the disparity here. The reviews should be one per restaruant experience. You shouldn't be able to gang up and review spam a restaurant, but there's no way we can prevent that without the review service cooperating with the restaurant.
I have a dietary restriction and I make it a point to explicitly call it out when I order my food, ie: “I’ll have the pasta. It’s vegetarian right?” Yet, now and then, I end up getting served something with meat. Especially now with the fake meat substitutes which honestly look 100% like meat to me.
Finding out the burger I’m eating is real meat after taking a few bites and seeing stringy sinew just completely ruins my entire meal.
When this happens, which happens more often than you would think (go ask your vegetarian friends how often they accidentally eat meat through no fault of their own), you can be sure I give them a damning 1-star review. I don’t care how my friends review them, then can give them 5-stars, that’s fine. But I’m giving them 1.
Huh? I've been a vegetarian for two decades, eat at restaurants often nowadays, and I've never had these sorts of issues. I mean, a small handful of times EVER someone made a mistake and served me meat (though once the mistake was mine) but that's quickly fixed. Never had issues where I ate half a real burger or anything like that.
I would never personally leave a one-star review for a mistake like this unless it was something that happened literally every time I went. I think leaving a one star review over a single mix-up is really petty. I also have the opinion that if you absolutely can't tolerate mistakes you should always be preparing your own food.
It’s people like you that we have this problem where giving someone 3 out of 5 stars can get them kicked off the platform. It’s because of people like you who won’t honestly review and rate things, giving them the benefit of the doubt, weighing the review more positively because they compensated for it.
No. It’s not petty.
They get 1 star because they messed up my order. Simple as that. Give me what I ordered and then I’ll consider giving them 2-5 stars. The fact that they fixed the issue does not even need to come into play here. They fucked up. They get 1 star. Simple. Easy. Done.
Mention that they fixed the issue, that they compensated for the meal, whatever. But leave the 1 star.
The world would be a better place if everything was rated properly, with a majority being 3 stars.
Convincing everyone you dined with to give a bad review as well? That's petty.
So the service they got might not be representative of the restaurants more typical service.
I've seen a 1 star review of a decent restaurant because "they didn't fill my water glass often enough" -- no other complaints. Sometimes you pay enough for this kind of service, but most restaurants (especially the ones that take a risk on a new server) are going to have bad days.
That said, any bad service or review during the early days of a restaurant are impactful on long term revenues. The slope of the curve in the early days has a bigger effect on the area under the curve.
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.
Trusted source, e.g. particular friends/family/reviewers. I've had far better experiences trusting one knowledgeable person than 100s of anonymous reviewers.
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.
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.
The cross city problem is one of the things I've looked at a lot (I actually wrote a design doc for it at a different company). Even with really good coverage in New York/San Francisco/London/Tokyo due to our teams being based there, it was hard to get significant personalized ranking improvement. Maybe it's better now that they have a lot more data.
"Restaurants liked by people who like x and y and z"
We have poor to mediocre sushi restaurants here in Raleigh, NC if you judge them by the quality of their fish. Now, I'm not saying I'm a sushi connoisseur, but I've been to high end sushi restaurants in major cities (Atlanta, NYC, LA, Miami) and I know what we're getting here isn't even close to premium. But people review some of our restaurants and say "this is the best sushi I've ever had."
But you know, you go to these restaurants and see what most people order and they are rolls with insane amounts of sweet sauce on them and sure, they are pretty to look at, but if you're looking for say, an edible piece of Uni here, you aren't going to find it.
This is a country where people think Olive Garden is good Italian after all.
So anyway, I ignore the star reviews and try to find a review where someone took a few minutes to describe what they liked and disliked. One or two reviews like that are way more valuable than the ratings and it's usually pretty easy to spot the fakes.
Specific example. This place has mediocre sushi, a menu that hasn't changed in years, and their service is often slow:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/yuri-japanese-restaurant-cary
But they treat us like family. I'd never have found that out from Yelp reviews. No, on Yelp you find people complaining that they don't offer BOGO or the parking lot. Other people say it's the best sushi they've ever had. You won't find a review that says "typical neighborhood Japanese restaurant where they treat regulars like family. The service can sometimes be slow and it's not premium fish, but there's a variety of competently made sushi, and decent selection of non-sushi Japanese and Korean menu items. After a few times here, they'll probably start comp'ing you dessert."
Here's a Yelp review from another Japanese restaurant in the area:
> I used Uber Eats to get delivery and it was delicious. Sushi is generally really good or really bad. Not much in between. The disposable chopsticks were the cheapest I've ever seen. Those could definitely be improved.
That's a 5-star review. I mean, come on.
See also: rotten tomato audience scores.
But you also have the problem that OP described where people literally have no idea what quality actually taste like so they can get away with selling mediocre fish. Nearly all fruit in the United States is another example. My cousin by marriage was born abroad and he absolutely refuses to eat his favorite fruit, mango, because so much of it is outright trash and even a "good"mango sucks in comparison
But, there's a variety of pineapple you can only get only in Hawaii that's way better. And I've only ever sourced really good key limes from friends and family trees in Florida.
Store bought tomatoes are also usually shit, but you can get ones from the farmers markets and road-side stands.
NC has a bounty of fruit and vegetables available locally grown:
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/central-north-carolina-planting...
https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-melons-cost-price-s...
That said, the pricy melons are usually bought as gifts, not eating yourself. Compare with eg. high-end whiskey.
(I'm also pretty happy with $30 bourbon compared to what single-malts are up to these days.)
Or, try apples in a place that actually grows a large amount and diversity of apples. In season, you can walk into some grocery stores and find 20+ varieties that all actually taste unique.
It essentially gives a 'low-brow' and 'high-brow' rating of a movie. And depending on my mood and who I am watching with, that is very useful information.
But the fish could be less than premium and still be the best sushi that person has ever had.
That could be a truthful, honest review.
I moved away from Raleigh about a year ago and I miss it.
I do however feel it's really odd for restauranteurs to feel the immediate need to tailor flavors for the entire menu to the local palate as if people could never dare eat a pepper or something.
At some point I found the r/gatekeeping Reddit and realized what an insufferable asshole I was being.
As if, all problems can't be solved by building websites connected to databases.
Strange.
Professional critics may help with that, but they could suck at that, too. It's pretty common for them to echo common thought so they don't get considered a moron by the community of professional critics.
If you want to run a business that is professional criticism, my feedback to you is that while I'm in the market for quality information (so I pay the WSJ and the Economist), I won't pay for what you're talking about.
I would probably pay for a timely recommendation from a friend at 100x what I'd pay for a professional opinion. Maybe I'd pay like 5 cents for a professional opinion. Hope that helps.
There was absolutely zero chance that a restaurant that made spectacular food but didn't do anything novel would even be on their radar.
I don't think I'm addicted, I just don't know what else to do. How would you recommend I evaluate a product or service before buying it, if I don't personally know someone who can give a recommendation?
I do try to look at trusted professional review sites where possible (The Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc), but that only works for certain types of popular products.
Reviews are the worst way of figuring out where to eat without prior knowledge, except for all the other ways we have tried.
In a totally uniform space, even the smallest thing to help you stand out is enough to make first-order decision making latch on to the small thing. I suppose more advanced decision making would do some intentional exploration of the uniform space.
Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like:
Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable.
This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.
Would not normally link to life hacker, but it has a good summary of the situation here is Aus.
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/02/is-it-legal-to-post-a-...
1) ignore 1 and 5 star reviews. This filters out the gut reactions, and the 2s and 4s reviews are generally a lot more level-headed and informative
2) pick an area with a good density of restaurants. Just go there and go into whichever is busy
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.
Then the problem shifts to: do I want to risk my no-claim discount, or do I want to go with the safe option?
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.
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.
Do I take travel insurance for routine trips that might involve me losing $200 for having to cancel a plane flight and maybe some hotels. Nope.
But if I have a high 4 figures trip that I'll have to cancel if I sprain my ankle or because a family member who is having health problems needs me to stay home? Or because I know there could be expensive evacuation if something goes wrong. That seems a pretty good use of a few hundred dollars.
Of course, in my case, this is pretty much the definition of adverse selection but maybe the relatively reasonable rates I can get are being subsidized by all the people who buy the insurance routinely.
- You've prepaid an expensive trip and can't go on it for some covered reason (injury, family situation)
- Or you're on a trip and have to be expensively evacuated/repatriated (pulmonary edema in Nepal/break both your legs in Paris)
For most of us who normally travel a lot, it's not about having to spend $1K out of pocket because luggage got lost/stolen or you had to do some complicated rebooking because of a delayed flight.
The cost of the flight and hotels is irrelevant though.
If you have a medical emergency while in a foreign country you could be looking at millions of dollars of costs to treat and repatriate you. That would bankrupt most people. Even if you're just popping to another city for a day - if it's in another country I think you really must be insured.
Most of the time I'd be covered by my company anyway and I do buy travel insurance when doing activities with greater than normal risk. But I'd be surprised if anyone I know routinely bought travel insurance for foreign travel. I literally have never heard it come up in a conversation.
This seems like a fairly balanced overview of the subject: https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/trip-planning/travel-...
This is also a legal requirement as underselling the cost of the underlying risks can put your company at risk of insolvency.
States hate having insurance companies go bust in case of a real emergency so there are liquidity, zip underwriting and other preventive measures to keep companies kicking because the alternative causes the state to eat the costs.
Take health insurance where you get free stop-smoking plans. It makes the barrier for signing up to such a plan much lower, which is good for you. It also makes the chance of people suffering from lung cancer lower, which is good for your insurer.
Huh, what insurance works like that? If you pay a rate based on how much you used it, you might as well pay for the thing you're having the insurance pay for. I get that such an insurance will catch outliers still (saving you from a big boo-boo) but that's the only kind of thing insurances are for: big boo-boos (chance events that cost you disproportionately much compared to how much reducing the risk of them to zero would cost, like surgery or your house burning down). If you use it for frivolous stuff like, say, covering for a $10 meal, imagine the overhead, the management costs of all those claims, the arbitration, and the little you get out of it unless you order at a shitty restaurant and get unlucky nearly every time because you travel a lot for work and don't know the good places around -- oh wait, in your model that means you pay more anyway and it's not worth it, so every subscriber is really only lining the manager's pockets.
Just eat mediocre food for once or order elsewhere if the food is actually inedible. The lack of repeat custom is surely worth more to a restaurant than refunding those ten dollars you're sour about.
Yes. For example no-claims bonuses on car insurance means you pay less if you claim less.
> If you pay a rate based on how much you used it, you might as well pay for the thing you're having the insurance pay for.
No. For example say my car insurance is £500 or something. It goes down £50 a year every year I don't use it, due to no-claims bonuses. But it's still less than paying for a major accident out-of-pocket that could cost £5 million.
Actually, it very much did.
The answer is that you suck it up and go to the new place--live a little.
I eat at a lot of different places. Normally the food isn't awful--most are just mediocre and I won't be back without some other reason (There is an Asian chain restaurant in London that was so BAD I can't even remember its name--that's one of the exceptions). Some are good, but too expensive for what you got--they go on my "If someone really wants <Food X>, I can take them there."
And then there are the few that are "good and reasonably priced (or maybe even cheap)". And the occasional "Expensive, but worth it".
Those are the ones you will recommend when your friends ask.
What would make me try new restaurants?
Something new and novel. Can you make me something that the other restaurants can't? Do you provide ability to customize my dishes? Maybe call your customers with opportunity for big discount or food, tell them about your restaurant more and listen to their feedback. I recommend a single restaurant everytime someone asks me about food place here because I know their service is consistent and great. They don't care about reviews as much as my word.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the platform isn't actively hostile to it, I always use the full set of stars with the expectation that it's a normal distribution and 3 stars will be by far the most common rating. It actually works pretty well in some places, e.g., Netflix's DVD rental service, which still uses 5-star ratings, almost always correctly predicts my ratings to within half a star because I've rated a ton of movies.
But I'd never do it to an Uber driver: I may live in a mental world where an uneventful ride ought to be rated 3 stars and someone would have to really go above and beyond to earn 5 stars, but actually doing that would be a cruel act given how the system works in practice.
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.
I would bet you find a similar problem with Amazon products that can get sunk by just a few negative reviews early on.
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.
Now maybe the comment really is poor quality, but sometimes it's a really clever joke that goes over the initial downvoters' heads
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.
If we ask ourselves: were online reviews a good thing? To me clearly no. Authenticity has been the price.
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?