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. :(
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.
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.
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.
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.