A Year After Restaurant Owner Asked Me To Change Yelp Review, Things Got Weird

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(photo: colonelchi)

You may remember reader Mark, who left a bad Yelp review for a local tavern back in 2013, then received a request from the business’s new owner asking him to change or remove the review. Mark declined. That was a year ago: the owner apparently went through his Yelp inbox recently to rage at correspondents. Here is our gift to small business owners: another cautionary tale about how not to handle your online presence.

To refresh your memory, here’s the original message that Mark received a year ago, several years after reviewing a local restaurant.

Reading between the lines, the restaurant owner appears to be responding to a contact from Yelp, and makes the

Hey Mark my name is Joe I own [redacted] I just bought it in April 2014 trying to clean up my yelp any chance you could take your post down
Thank You joe

Maybe if the new owner had asked more nicely, he would have considered it, but that didn’t happen. Mark let the review stand. He didn’t return to the restaurant.

Then he heard from the owner a year later. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the owner was contacted by Yelp, possibly by an ad sales representative. He claims that the representative asked him to effectively pay Yelp to make bad reviews go away, a frequent allegation that the Federal Trade Commission and businesses that have sued Yelp haven’t been able to produce evidence of the alleged shakedowns.

Business owners, stay away from Facebook while angry. Just stay away.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist