Elliot Ball welcomes honesty in a review – even a negative one – but  he questions what motivates some people to damage ratings seemingly for the sake of it. 

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The real flamers I understand – for good or bad – but when the review is mid, mild and really not worth writing, it just gets me. I hate mediocre reviews.

Hence an article inspired by this very type of reviewer: a customer recently decided to publicly broadcast the opinion that we’d “lost our edge” – changing our seating to pack people in, increasing prices and “no longer caring”.

Like anything, just enough of it is true to make it hurt. We have had to increase prices for reasons absolutely nobody reading this needs explaining, but the seating, the “nobody caring” and the “losing our edge” – are on the spectrum of plain wrong to needlessly exaggerated. But actually none of this is about whether they’re correct – I wanna talk about why they published it.

I just don’t believe the motive was in some sort of democratic spirit – altruism even – that the customer was trying to help others avoid the perils of a bad experience. I think that kind of motivation among guests comes from an infuriatingly awful experience. Indeed, there is something straightforwardly honest about vitriol, especially if we fucked up.

No, public complaints about a bar “losing its edge” point to a different thinking entirely. It’s about how the act of complaining makes them feel about themselves. It’s about shaping and projecting their identity as a discerning person; it’s about self-validation. Or so I think, in my dark times. Lowering the numerical rating (that then affects a bar’s marketability) on Google because you can is low-key psychopath behaviour. There can’t be a person in the UK who isn’t aware that hospitality businesses are struggling, that if there was ever a time to cut a business some slack, it would be now.

Lowering ratings

There are other – more innocent – reviews that bring down our rating completely unnecessarily and equally frustratingly. I give you the “OMG LOVED THIS PLACE, pricier than North Wales tho”, which is then accompanied by a 4* rating of a venue with a 4.9 average, bringing it down. Of course, the requisite reply is always “aww thanks – come again soon!”.

I don’t know what’s worse – being so unaware of how a Google rating works that you’d jovially dock a point because the bar’s pricing reflects that it’s a bar in central London, not Wrexham, or knowing that you’re doing harm and doing it anyway as part of some egomaniacal crusade against imperfection.

I guess people feel like they are critiquing an entity, a business and not real people. And if we were part of a huge chain, it’s reasonable to expect that. But with small businesses, there are always people for whom the criticism matters, people who take it personally. Of course, before the internet, the online bar review would have been a brief exchange among friends – the online space offers the complainant a stage and near anonymity.

I’m reminded of something Dishoom has on a wall – “if you enjoyed, tell others. If not, tell us”. I might add to that: “If you just want to say something, anything, there are mirrors in the bathroom.”