I was flipping through the news paper this morning before leaving for work and an article in the Dining section caught my eye. The article’s headline was Yelp’s power grates on wary restaurants. This is something I’ve often thought about since having a scalding review written about someone’s experience at Lush with me behind the counter. That particular situation was handled shortly after it happened and the review is no longer posted on yelp.com however, there are plenty more like it up there for restaurants all over the country. Today’s article covered the issues that arise when people are given the opportunity to make uniformed and unqualified critiques of businesses and other people use them to decide whether or not to patronize that business. I, personally, find Yelp to be a forum that is entirely uninteresting to me, but I can not deny the sway it has among “foodies” at least here in Chicago. The problem I have with Yelp is no fault of its own, it’s merely a side effect of the internet itself: it affords its users an unrestricted and unchecked opportunity to vent (or speak, rather) their personal feelings and have no concern for any recourse by the proprietor of the business (but also offer the proprietor no opportunity to change their opinion). When a restaurant is reviewed on Yelp, the person writing the review is never obligated to stand by their words or justify them in any way, and I think that is wrong. In fact, the article today had an example from the owners (husband and wife) of two restaurants here in Chicago in which the wife was at another restaurant waiting for her husband to arrive when she overheard a person at another table “trashing” their restaurants. When her husband arrived, he recalled the man’s face “go[ing] white” and, after the wife telling him “we own those restaurants,” the man “ran out of the place.” This makes me wonder if people really mean what they say on Yelp, or at least are prepared to stand by their words once they’ve written them. I think that if you are going to make a bold statement about someone’s work, you should first be qualified to make such a statement, and second, be comfortable with making it a dialogue, let the person defend them self before you go and publish it and let other people put stock in what you say. The internet is a wild place and I think that is good. Ideas can spread faster than ever and we can do and learn things any time we like but, like the Spiderman comics say, “with great power comes great responsibility.” In fact, the article states, a correlation has been shown between Yelp reviews and the level of business with regard to restaurants. The only person keeping you in check on the internet is you and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can be mature enough to handle that responsibility, it really doesn’t take that much foresight to realize that, when you say something publicly, it could potentially could be heard/read/whatever by the person it concerns. There’s really nothing wrong with that either, except when the criticism is cruel, personal, or just plain mistaken. In my experience, the people who own restaurants want people to have a good experience at their place and, given the opportunity, will do almost anything to make sure people do. When the review was written that involved me, it was hurtful and it included very few critiques of the store and really focused on insulting me and calling me names, frankly it was pretty juvenile. The person who wrote it took it down as soon as I wrote her about it which makes me wonder if she thought it was valid. I suppose that, in this realm of little or no regulation, we need to be ready to keep ourselves in check and take a step back and think about what would happen if what we wrote or said got back to the person it concerned before clicking “Send.”
By the way, I understand the irony of commenting on the website that allows people to comment, without restriction, on pretty much whatever they want. I hope I have been fair and just here and if not, please let me know.
