One definition of evil is doing what profits you without caring whether or not you hurt others. Some people are so cheap that they don’t care who loses money, so long as they can save a few bucks. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call these rude people pure evil, but they really are walking a bit too close to the dark side of the Force for my liking.
A guy called Matt begged for a discount when he was buying a screen, but his attempts were fruitless, so he left a 1-star Yelp review. However, what he probably didn’t expect was that the Business owner would reply and explain in minute detail exactly why the reviewer was wrong. I love the smell of faultless logic in the morning. Don’t you?
Image credits: Paul Sableman (not the actual photo)
A dissatisfied customer left a 1-star review on Yelp, after he didn’t get a 9 dollar discount
A Reddit user by the name of Thicc_Pug posted the interaction on the ‘Choosing Beggars’ subreddit; the post got more than 53,600 upvotes. One individual, who is a small business owner, commented that this story made their morning. While another exclaimed, the store owner has the delivered the best comeback ever.
The store owner left a lengthy reply, and used logic to explain why he was in the right
In an interview, Reddit user Thicc_Pug told Bored Panda their thoughts about what happened. “I think that the store owner is 100% right in this situation. He is not the one selling his item at a loss; that's not how business works. Asking for a discount is totally fine. However, after being rejected for a discount and still continuing to ask for, it is not fine. And writing a bad customer review after that only because you didn't get a discount just proves that he is a stupid person.”
“I think small businesses are vulnerable to reviews, but it is very unlikely only to get stupid people like that to review your product. However, one bad review has much more effect on the product that one good review. I have seen that for some salespeople, a 4-star review is not good enough. The problem is fake reviews or liars. On Yelp, you don't even need to buy a product or be a customer of the store you are reviewing, so there might be some fake reviews that are bad, especially for small businesses. There needs to be a point system for reviews and history for each reviewer, so it's easier to tell whether this reviewer is legit or not.”
Bored Panda also reached out to the electronics repair technician store owner Louis Rossmann, who goes by the moniker larossmann on Reddit. Rossmann said that he believes Yelp reviewers have grown accustomed to receiving special treatment.
He also suggested what could be done to reduce their influence over small businesses: “Stop giving it to them. Treat people the way you feel you deserve to be treated, give every customer your all— try and go out of your way to make people feel secure, less anxious, and happy they came to you. This will alleviate your guilt when you tell people who are acting like brats to GTFO.”
This is how the internet reacted to the story
Worst reviews on Yelp can make or break some businesses, but they don’t scare everybody. For example, in 2014, one chef Davide Cerretini decided that he had enough reviewers controlling his life. That’s when he declared that he’d give a 25% pizza discount to anybody who left a 1-star review on Yelp about his restaurant in Richmond, California. This made Cerrentini’s restaurant Botto Bistro famous almost overnight because it was a blow to Yelp.
“I got thousands and thousands of letters, thousands of emails a day,” Cerretini told the media. “People were sending me boxes of chocolates, cash, checks. Business owners from all over the country stopped by to thank me and write a bad review.”