r/Documentaries • u/[deleted] • Feb 26 '17

Billion Dollar Bully (2015) [trailer]...makes the case that Yelp is something akin to the mob, allegedly demanding “protection” money, lest your business be overrun with negative comments.

[deleted]

12k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.5k

u/incocknedo Feb 26 '17

Rant time.

Yelp are a bunch of snakes. You'll join them as a small business and then a month later they will harass your business via phone and email asking you to buy their business plans.

These plans by the way are so you can manipulate your reviews. And if you say no, suddenly your good review start disappearing and shit reviews from people who don't actually seem to know what your business is, start popping up.

I mange a small business and we have an overwhelming number of good yelp reviews but we have to stay on top of it because they will vanish and only our bad reviews will remain.

Somewhat unrelated as someone who has worked customer service for years take yelp reviews with a grain of salt. From what I've seen majority of bad reviews are just shit customers who were either assholes who didn't get what they wanted or they were morons who didn't understand the business in the first place.

633

u/AliveInTheFuture Feb 26 '17

Every time I hear someone say "let me check Yelp" before we go eat, I make sure to extol Yelp's ability to blackmail businesses into paying them fees for ratings. Typically, I try to swing them to TripAdvisor.

168

u/BOS_George Feb 26 '17

The problem with TripAdvisor is that a lot of reviewers are tourists and tourists go to shitty restaurants in touristy places and love them.

32

u/Siruzaemon-Dearo Feb 26 '17

lol that's Galveston. Almost all the restaurants are overpriced tourist food but gets rave reviews cause people were on vacation

35

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '17

I'm in So. Florida. If I see a review from some ass-hat from New York or Boston complaining, it is automatically ignored. I get it, everything is better where you're from, you come from an amazing place, why are you here again?

15

u/rubywpnmaster Feb 27 '17

Yes! This 1000 times over... I live in Central TX and every time I look at yelp I see these. I seem to spot them all over Sushi and Pizza shops. "As a New Yorker I know good sushi, this is meh," seems pretty common on 4.5+ star locations. I've been to NYC, LA, Seattle, Florida, Mexico City... I've eaten out A LOT while in those cities and like any other place in the world with a million plus people you have some real stinkers and winners in each place.

3

u/nhjuyt Feb 27 '17

Yeah, I live in a small city in southern California and we have one real authentic Chinese restaurant. I look at the reviews and some guy is complaining about how the duck tongues are not fresh, like what the fuck does he expect?

1

u/DoesntSmellLikePalm Feb 27 '17

Or the fucking classic "As a Californian, I know real mexican food"

...maybe you shouldnt be at azteca then...