Everybody gets a star: Yelp's effect on restaurants and reviews
eater.comI guess I’m in the minority, but I can’t remember the last time I used Yelp to find restaurants. It’s been obvious for years (it feels like at least 10, maybe more) that they can’t be trusted.
I’m actually surprised they still get enough traffic to be sustainable.
Yelp is bad (really bad) but so is everyone else. I still use them on road trips alongside Google Maps and Apple Maps simply because none of them show all the restaurants in an area. It's kind of unbelievable how frustrating it is to try to get a complete look at all the restaurants nearby some location. Then again, it's a good trip if Google Maps doesn't ask me to turn left across three lanes onto a private alley and right through a brick wall (true story).
I feel like it used to work better than before. I don't just mean "and they all had more of the restaurants" I mean there will be a ton of restaurants in the map and Google Maps will only pick about half to make red when I click "Restaurants". It'd make some sense as a density problem but it still shows the restaurant markers, just with orange labels instead of red ones!
If I open Apple Maps and look for restaurants around me, tapping on one displays partial pics and reviews from Yelp. Tapping on those to read more will request I install the Yelp app. I would guess this integration is at least a contributing factor.
Same. Yelp is for finding pics of menus and food. Googling "<name of city> restaurants reddit" is for finding good places to go.
reddit is gamed as well, depending on the subreddit
Reddit is better than Yelp (what isn't?), but I haven't found Reddit to be particularly useful for this sort of thing.
side not, wtf did google do to their menu photos, its like a canvas u can zoom in or get the any type of img?
I stopped using them because they became unreliable. They turned pay to play into an art. Can't trust them at all
They turned into an online version of the mob. Pay them and they'll take care that your bad reviews are gone. Don't pay and risk getting a few extra bad reviews
It’s equivalent to crowd sourcing star ratings for music. How could I know our tastes are compatible?
Yelp ratings are basically useless, except for egregious things like cockroaches found running around. The worst part about the site and Google is that they paginate restaurants in a local map view by rating. It would be better to see everything all at once for certain views.
But restaurants that delist themselves for whatever reason from the review sites, also delist themselves from me ever going to them.
I'm never going to choose a restaurant where I can't see pictures of the food and the menu before going ever again.
It doesn't have to be Yelp, but if I search and didn't see the restaurant, it doesn't exist and I will never go to it. If I pass by a place and it isn't brand new, yet they've scrubbed their web presence, I'm not going to go.
There's no reason to take a chance, and any place that is trying to hide from it, will just always be a place not worth bothering to find out why they are hiding.
Most excellent restaurants where I live would never post pictures of their food anywhere and have no web presence at all. In many you can’t even reserve a table - you go there and eat. Those who need a lot of web presence / pictures etc are usually not great (good but not great).
If you see lots of people in a place and it’s crowded it’s probably good.
What area do you live where this is true? Michelin places may prevent customers from taking pictures, in my experience only the overrated ones do this, but they have their presence with information on the Michelin site.
In Tokyo, everywhere but the smallest stand, and often times even them, had reviews on Tabelog. In my smaller East Coast city, every restaurant I've seen within walking distance of my apartment has reviews and their menu online.
Places famous before the internet may get away with forcing their customers to pay in cash and no SEO, but places that completely delete themselves from the web are hiding something. They will also just never come up in a discussion about where to eat because they don't show up online.
> What area do you live where this is true?
I'm not who you're responding to, but this is certainly true in my part of the US.
> If you see lots of people in a place and it’s crowded it’s probably good.
McDonalds? it's even called a "restaurant"...
The absence of a web presence is not a sufficient indicator that a business might hide something from you. There are multiple reasons which can lead to the decision to not participate in this playing field.
> I'm never going to choose a restaurant where I can't see pictures of the food and the menu before going ever again.
That's certainly a choice, but you're missing out on a lot by doing that.
You seem to not like to go to better establishments. The best in my area do not advertise at all.
It's only the run of the mill restaurants which have a web presence
Me too. I avoid Yelp because they're worse than worthless, and I'm always surprised to hear that anyone finds value in them.
I use Yelp and Google Reviews pretty regularly. If a restaurant has a bad score it might still be good. If it has a good score with lots of ratings then it's probably pretty decent.
not my experience.
I feel like (a) people like places bexasue they're trendy, not delicious. (b) People also like to brag and posting reviews give a small dose of whatever it is that people get from posting in Instagram. (c) Most people don't like to be mean so odds of a bad review for restaurants are lower. (d) there are also cultural norms. Check restaurant reviews in Japan in Japanese, most are in the 3.1 to 3.8 of 5 range where as USA Engliah google maps it's more like an average of 4.5
Also people's tastes are different. I recently went to two highly rated coffee shops. Had some of the blandest food of my life. So bad bland I decided not to eat it because why get fat if it's not enjoyable. But it was highly rated. I think if all you get is a coffee and a croissant then you're only judging on atmosphere
> If it has a good score with lots of ratings then it's probably pretty decent.
I haven't noticed this at all. As near as I can tell, the rating of a restaurant on Yelp is completely uncorrelated with how good or bad the restaurant is.
So what do you use instead?
I pick a restaurant and go to it. It's almost always fine.
We managed for centuries without comprehensive reviews of every single restaurant from every two bit individual who thinks they have a valid opinion on cooking. I genuinely don't understand, don't you people ever do anything you haven't been recommended by an algorithm?
I have never looked at reviews for restaurants. I will use Google maps to look for "nearby" places, but I will not look at the reviews.
does beli not have a website? wild choice if so.
I know I'm a minority, but I refuse to do research on a 3.5"x6" screen.
somehow tabelog seems pretty legit compared to yelp. maybe there are issues in the japanese bubbles idk about and cant participate in. but on a trip to japan following that site led me to some amazing meals.
Some of these problems seems like the cause is because its hard to complain in person. I guess we all get labeled "karens" now for showing any kind of negative feedback in person, so we just suck it up and never go back and maybe leave a negative review.
i dont really rely on yelp, there's to many people with poor to average taste. google maps is ok, but same issue with taste. like the complaints people leave on some top tier restaurants are crazy.
eater has led me to some great restaurants locally and abroad. when traveling ill look at travel and food shows, or look and see whats busy, get local recommendations. one of my most memorable meals in bali was a rec from a kid working a cash register.
I'm also impressed with tabelog.
Japanese reviewers seem to understand that 3 is an average meal, and anything higher should be above average.
I wonder how tipping culture of the western world impacts star averages. Americans tip on just about everything. Do we inflate our star rating because it's in our mindset to 'be nice'?
Whereas Japanese are courteous on the outside, but uphold strict scrutiny on the inside. So when they rate something as 3 stars, it truly was a satisfactory meal, nothing more or less.
It's the same in Europe with the 5-stars-is-normal scale.
In my personal experience it's the app that fosters it. Many companies who ask for reviews follow up anything below 5 stars or 10/10 with "how can we improve?" Or some similar questions. This is friction they generate for me as a user if I rate anything below top tier.
Personally for me 5 stars or 10/10 would be service that is so good I couldn't even tell you how to do it. I couldn't tell you how to improve to that state unless the business in question is something I'm very familiar with. Still I sometimes find myself handing out 5 stars because otherwise I have to find something to complain about and I just can't think of anything.
So that is what has made 5 stars for me go from "mind blowingly outstanding" to "nothing to complain".
The problem really is that one single metric is insufficient to grade all restaurants. 5* at a fine dining place at £150/cover is quite different to 5* at gastropub, is quite different at a chain restaurant. You can't expect to grade or interpret all restaurants on the same scale. I just interpret the star rating as overall subjective experience, which is mostly a delta from expectations.
Agreed. I live in Europe and have the same experience.
Europeans tend to use the same review apps as Americans, so it could lead to the same problems (expectations at least). We do the same things with other review systems like Airbnb.
I've only been a user of tabelog as a person looking for a meal, not a reviewer. So I'm not sure the experience they have.
I think many Americans rate 5 stars if the business met all their expectations and then remove a star for each unsatisfactory experience.
Reviews look something like “4 stars: I removed a star because...”
I give 5 stars when I love something and 1 star when I hate something. Like an up or downvote.
You're correct on this. Tabelog users center hard around 3 stars which is considered the real average. Users on sites like Yelp and Google Maps skew toward an average of 4.5 or 5 for what is considered a standard experience. This makes it extremely difficult to sort for places that are extraordinary because everyone keeps rating the max amount of stars by default. Same problem on Amazon. It doesn't really help to only filter for 1-3 star reviews for each place and read them all because my time is finite and I don't have all day.
I would disagree that the issue in Yelp and Google is that folks skewed to the right in their ratings - my experience has been that if a restaurant has 4.5+, it’s a safe bet. There’s literally no more information you can glean from google. Perhaps the number of votes but even that is not absolute. You have to depend on other sources for any more indication that it’s a good place. My go to source is Reddit. If I go to that city’s subreddit and I can’t find that restaurant mentioned it’s likely not mind blowing.
My point is we're different types of users, or our expectations are different. "A safe bet" is not 4.5 stars to me, it's 3 stars because average restaurants should be safe bets. I believe anything 4.5+ should be home runs because I'm putting faith in the score of the restaurant actually having more meaningful information embedded in it. Unfortunately this is not the case because American sites think anything 3.5 and below is automatically shit or something will go horribly wrong. I keep going to 4.4+ restaurants on Google Maps which are actually ~3.2 on Tabelog, but when I go to a 4.2+ on Tabelog I know for sure this is a top-tier restaurant and this has never failed.
For google maps I honestly have better experiences with 4 out of 5s than ones closer to 5 out of 5. No idea why
4/5 might mean they're being more adventurous with their food. This won't necessarily suit everybody.
>> I guess we all get labeled "karens" now for showing any kind of negative feedback in person
Being a Karen is more about "how" you complain rather than "what" you complain about.
(With exceptions, complaining about race etc makes you a Karen too.)
But in the context of a restaurant, well mannered complaints are often well received and encouraged. If the food arrives cold, let the server know. Politely. Calmly. The restaurant wants to know, they want to fix the problem.
Leaping to your feet, throwing the food on the floor, and making a scene out of proportion to the offense is what turns you into a Karen.
> making a scene out of proportion to the offense is what turns you into a Karen.
+1
Tabelog has its share of crazies who dish out one-star ratings for the stupidest things ("the cashier's smile didn't seem sincere"), and the top listings are usually paid ads. But at least the ads are marked, and if there's enough reviews the outliers get averaged out.
> Some of these problems seems like the cause is because its hard to complain in person.
I was recently in an airport in Japan looking to use the meal voucher I'd been given due to a delayed flight.
What was available locally was a coffee shop with a very long line (well, not a long line, maybe ten feet, but keep reading), which operated like this:
- The person at the head of the line would advance and speak to the cashier, who would take their coffee order.
- The cashier would then leave the cash register and busy herself making the order.
- There were two other people on staff, who stayed away from the register. I'm not sure what they were supposed to be doing. They didn't take or prepare orders.
As you might imagine, this made for a very slow-moving line.
I wanted to use my voucher to buy some sodas from a refrigerated display in front of the counter. I had no trouble picking the sodas up myself and learning that the shop accepted meal vouchers. The voucher was exact change for the four sodas I was holding, so I hoped that that would be the end of things.
Instead, on learning that I wanted to use the voucher I was asking about, to pay for the sodas I was already holding, the cashier asked me to please line up with everybody else. Since that would have taken at least 40 minutes, I went to see whether a separate wing of the airport might have something.
That didn't work out, but I did run into my family (taking a separate flight), and after some socializing I went back to try and get sodas for everybody, since the competing store we'd found didn't take meal vouchers.
This time, after several minutes standing in line, I realized that there was no possibility of reaching the head of the line before I had to board my flight. So I hailed one of the idle behind-the-counter staff, specifically avoiding the cashier, and asked about my meal voucher. They were still happy to take it.
When I tried to make the purchase, the cashier butted in and asked me to please line up behind everybody else. And I shouted in frustration, "That takes so long!"
At which point, they took my voucher and let me walk off with the sodas. The voucher was still exact change.
I'm not sure what the solution was supposed to be. I find it hard to believe that you're supposed to handle deeply dysfunctional shop staff by yelling at them. But I have to note that this 'solution' saved me a huge chunk of time - and made it possible for me to make a purchase, and the shop to make a sale, that otherwise couldn't have happened at all - while not costing anyone else anything, except perhaps for wounding the cashier's heartfelt sense of propriety.
One lesson seems to be that in some cases, complying with the rules serves no purpose other than to enable actively harmful rules to remain in place.
Might that situation (very long wait for service, seemingly-idle employees) be partly explained (or at least rationalized) as a sort of social ritual, to make the establishment seem high-class, or the patrons wealthy leisure-seekers?
I've seen similar situations in a number of American coffee shops and fancy sandwich shops. Workers can easily outnumber the waiting customers. The spare ones usually appear busy - with tasks that don't seem to related to getting anyone's order filled. Actually filling an order seems to be an intentionally-inefficient ritual performance. The (presumed) regulars don't seem to care.
> Might that situation (very long wait for service, seemingly-idle employees) be partly explained (or at least rationalized) as a sort of social ritual, to make the establishment seem high-class, or the patrons wealthy leisure-seekers?
Well, it's a kiosk with no seating inside an airport. Presumably, there are no regulars either.
That’s hilarious but entirely in line with my experience that most of these places are inefficiently run. The ones that become huge are just run decently and get all this stuff done. The staff are trained on what to prioritize and they have post its reminding how to work.
When doing work, many of us need simple flowcharts and a good operator knows how to make his staff into automatons in places like this.
I bet that " in Japan " (not the slashdot meme!) played a big part in this.
They really take their queues and queue order (FIFO) seriously.
they let you do it to get rid of the asshole foreigner who doesn't know the local customs.
waiting your turn, period, is part of Japanese culture.
I get it can be frustrating. especially if your from the USA where increasingly no one waits their turn. Every day I see cars driving down the center lane to pass a few cars and then cutting back in.
I think the interesting thing about this post is the sense of entitlement.
Why does a businesses operating in a way you dislike entitle you to yell at them and break their rules?
Maybe the cause is conflating not getting your way with active harm. Refusing to serve you would be neutral, stealing from you would be harm.
Refusing to serve me is harmful to the shop in the most straightforward way you can possibly imagine. They make less money for the same amount of work.
Their entire operation is harmful (to them, and to everyone who buys from them) in the same way; they could easily double the number of customers they process by having one of the idle employees making the drinks instead of the cashier.
Yeah, I just think that is a strange standard for "harm". I dont think anyone would be harmed if they refused to serve anyone and every employee was idle. What if they dont want to double the number of customers and care more about something else.
I think it is best to approach interactions without entitlement. They dont owe you service, and can choose on which terms they will engage.
Your concept of harm reminds me of how some people think they are "harmed" if someone doesn't want to date them, becoming angry and aggressive.
> I dont think anyone would be harmed if they refused to serve anyone and every employee was idle.
The owner might have a different opinion.
> Your concept of harm reminds me of how some people think they are "harmed" if someone doesn't want to date them
...and? That's a pretty commonly recognized harm. For example, it's the basis of the tort "alienation of affections".
Alienation of affection is not when someone chooses not to date you. It is when a third party interferes maliciously, and even then it is recognized and very few jurisdictions. If you try to sue a random woman on the street for the harm done by not wanting to date you, you will be in for a rude awakening.
It's not a different harm when someone else interferes maliciously. The difference in whether you can sue is a difference in to what degree the other person was entitled to act as they did, not a difference in the harm you suffer.
Like I said, I think that's a pretty twisted definition of harm. You're harmed when you lose something you are entitled to, not whenever you don't get something that would be nice. The former is the ultimate victim mentality.
I'm not harmed if a female stranger walking down the street doesn't want to have sex, or if every man doesn't give his wallet, just because I ask for it.
You must to have some legitimate claim to a property or service to be harmed by not getting it.
This is not the correct way to evaluate policies; if I get a law passed that specifies that you may not date, marry, or reproduce, by definition you have no legitimate claim to those things, but I hope you'll agree that the law is harming you anyway.
In the case of the kiosk, their policies are making everyone worse off and nobody better off; this is the easiest possible case for "harmful policies".
There are government policies, and the policies of private parties.
If the government passes a law saying they kill two people for having consentual sex, yes, those people are harmed.
If one of those people has a policy that they dont want to have sex with you, that isnt harm.
In the case of the kiosk, the other private party is the one with their own personal policy. You dont get to dictate what is good for them and what they want. what if they care more about the line order than making money? that is totally within their rights.
The point is you dont get to make that decision for them any more than you do for a woman. You dont get to override and decide her preferences are simply wrong.
The only way to find places is word of mouth from people who have no stake in the venue. This is the only signal not being gamed.
The reviewer that removed star ratings in their reviews is onto something.
The most "real" reviews for restaurants right now is from city subreddits, of all places. Many of these suggestions are from people who live in the city instead of tourists who don't typically eat out (and have unrealistic expectations) or chronic reviewers who must be seen (I was one of them).
Adding stars or grades opens the door for gamification and petty tyrants who want to see businesses burn.
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Can we either remove the subtitle that’s not in the article or s/affect/effect?
s/Eeverybody/Everybody/ agrees.
I have never used Yelp before and it has never played any role in my life.
Must be an North American thing
Yeah; I believe Yelp is more north America centric. I've heard trip advisor is common in Europe for restaurant reviews.
I know its popular to rag on Yelp in tech circles, but Yelp is still immensely popular amongst everyone else.
It's the same reason that Meta is still raking in billions a year despite nobody in the tech community using it.