Yelp Members Demand Food
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, restaurant owners in the Bay Area are upset over patrons demanding free food in exchange for good reviews on Yelp.
Yes, that’s right, people are blackmailing restaurants into giving them free food. If the restaurants don’t comply, they’re threatened with a bad review on Yelp. From an email from a restaurateur:
Customers have begun threatening to ‘Yelp’ the restaurant if their demands are not met. Cafe Rouge experienced this phenomenon twice within the past month when comps were demanded with the threat that a harsh review would follow on the Yelp website if we didn’t comply. The expectation of how much to comp is also at issue, where a glass of wine, an appetizer or dessert no longer suffices. People do follow through on their threats as we have witnessed. When most restaurants are struggling to pay the bills in a recession economy, bad publicity is the last thing we want to see. On the other hand, comping lavishly in response to overt threats affects the bottom line.
I wonder if I could get free food by telling restaurants that I write for a semi-known Philadelphia, PA blog. Doubt it.
July 30th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
There are obviously issues with the whole review format as it currently exists. Our view is that reviews will always be important but down the road people will use is as a secondary tool to video. This is part of our thesis.