Yelp Reviews

 Like many people, I’m not a stranger to Yelp. If you’ve been active in the social media sphere for any amount of time, it’s hard not to know about it. As a service, it combines the two things that brings people together online: buying products and leaving bad reviews. Sure, Yelp is a good idea in theory--it’s important to give the customer a voice, and it’s nice when someone gives your business four stars or whatever rating system it has (last time I checked, they were using stars as a unit of measurement--I have no idea if they still do). Problem is, a lot of users don’t leave positive reviews on Yelp for whatever reason. It makes sense, in a way--businesses are supposed to run smoothly, so if I’m at King Kullen and have an average shopping experience there, it doesn’t motivate me to go online and write something like “yeah, it was alright.” If a cashier is rude to me or I see rats running around in the meat aisle, you can bet that I’ll suddenly be motivated to sit down and furiously type out an angry Yelp review.

This can be a problem, though--if people are only motivated to leave negative Yelp reviews, how can they be motivated to leave positive Yelp reviews? I’ve thought about this, and it seems like an unsolvable dilemma. Yeah, you can bribe people to give positive reviews by sending them free perks and gifts, but people see through that kind of stuff all the time. You can try giving your customers a magical experience at your shop, but that’s pretty unrealistic. Besides that, sometimes the problem isn’t the shop or business itself--the customer isn’t always right, after all--so how can you fix something that you have no control over? It’s an issue that doesn’t have an easy solution, and if there is one, it’s probably entirely out of our control.