Steve Kroll
Wine Guy
There are a few problems I find with online reviews.
First is the fallacy that the customer is always right. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine teaches wine education classes, and one night had a group of five young ladies come in who, unbeknownst to him, were throwing a bachelorette party for one of the girls in their group. Now there are usually 25-30 people in a class, and they typically pay $20-50 each to attend a 2-hour session. So there were other customers in attendance. In addition, the class was already in progress when this group showed up 10 minutes late.
The girls (I'll call them "girls" because they were all under 25), aside from being loud and disruptive, were clearly already a few sheets to the wind when they arrived. Because of this, my friend refused to serve them wine and politely asked them to leave, explaining that he legally isn't allowed to serve people who appear intoxicated. He also added that he would gladly refund what they had paid for the class. They left without incident, he continued the class, and thought that was the end of it.
Within two days he had several one-star reviews show up on Yelp. It seems the ringleader of the bunch had gone and asked a number of her friends to trash his business by writing unfavorable reviews, even though many of the complainers had never even set foot there. Apparently Yelp's automated content review caught and removed quite a few fake posts, but didn't catch all of them. He was able to get the remaining bad reviews removed, but it took almost a week and a lot of his own time to do so.
Another problem is that few people understand there are different levels that fall between one and five stars. If you look at reviews on Amazon, you see many 5-star reviews, some 1-star reviews, but not much that falls in between. I once had an online seller send me an email questioning my 4-star review and asking that I change it to 5-stars. I told him that I thought the product was only worth 4 stars; it was a good product, but had one design flaw I didn't particularly care for. I thought I was being generous with 4 stars. After his email, I did update my rating. I lowered it to 3 stars, noting his not-so-nice email pressing me to rate it higher. Never heard from him after that.
First is the fallacy that the customer is always right. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine teaches wine education classes, and one night had a group of five young ladies come in who, unbeknownst to him, were throwing a bachelorette party for one of the girls in their group. Now there are usually 25-30 people in a class, and they typically pay $20-50 each to attend a 2-hour session. So there were other customers in attendance. In addition, the class was already in progress when this group showed up 10 minutes late.
The girls (I'll call them "girls" because they were all under 25), aside from being loud and disruptive, were clearly already a few sheets to the wind when they arrived. Because of this, my friend refused to serve them wine and politely asked them to leave, explaining that he legally isn't allowed to serve people who appear intoxicated. He also added that he would gladly refund what they had paid for the class. They left without incident, he continued the class, and thought that was the end of it.
Within two days he had several one-star reviews show up on Yelp. It seems the ringleader of the bunch had gone and asked a number of her friends to trash his business by writing unfavorable reviews, even though many of the complainers had never even set foot there. Apparently Yelp's automated content review caught and removed quite a few fake posts, but didn't catch all of them. He was able to get the remaining bad reviews removed, but it took almost a week and a lot of his own time to do so.
Another problem is that few people understand there are different levels that fall between one and five stars. If you look at reviews on Amazon, you see many 5-star reviews, some 1-star reviews, but not much that falls in between. I once had an online seller send me an email questioning my 4-star review and asking that I change it to 5-stars. I told him that I thought the product was only worth 4 stars; it was a good product, but had one design flaw I didn't particularly care for. I thought I was being generous with 4 stars. After his email, I did update my rating. I lowered it to 3 stars, noting his not-so-nice email pressing me to rate it higher. Never heard from him after that.
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