Yelp is planning a comeback with reservations and pickup tools

modernretail.co

14 points·lxm··4 comments

Trust is this really funny thing. It takes a long time to build, and but a moment to sacrifice.

I believe, down in my sub-cockle area, that Yelp is just going to both show me and not-show me reviews, ratings, and rankings on the basis of "who has paid Yelp the most money".

It doesn't matter if Yelp has, or promises, to stop doing so. That pool has been thoroughly peed in.

So if I want to find a restaurant, I do the old-fashioned thing: ask a few locals where they would go for a nice steak/curry/etc, and triangulate from there.

To second that from the other side of the fence, I do not know what restaurant would do business with Yelp in such an integral way. It would be "great"/s, I change my advertising spending and magically they start loosing my online orders and reservations, oops.

Then the phone calls would start "Hi I am from Yelp just wanted to help get your advertising account started back up it seems to have accidentally been stopped. And it seems here that your online ordering somehow got disconnected from your POS. OOPSY"

This company calls me every time I get a review on Yelp to help me "setup my account." I don't do business with the mob.

As a consumer, it has served me well to explore every new city by checking out top rated eateries on yelp. I hope they sort their business out with restaurants. Their relationship should be pretty symbiotic.

Personally I see Yelp as an extortionary business that hurts the businesses more than it helps, and as a consumer I refuse to use them.

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