Mondays with Mike: Rate this

Just returned from a business trip to Boston for a conference and trade show. Stayed at a very nice, hipper than I am, but completely satisfying
hotel. For yucks, I looked up reviews on Yelp after my stay.

All I can say is: What is wrong with us?

Among the Yelps from the whining, er, discriminating Yelpers:

Toilet was covered in hair shavings prior to use of the room. 

Mind you, this Yelp was accompanied by a photo of said hair shavings. I was worried about the Yelper trauma and decades of therapy that was surely required afterward but was comforted when I read on:

The situation was corrected immediately by hotel staff.

Still, unforgiveable, don’t you think? Don’t you think the overpaid cleaning person responsible should be fired with no severance? It wasn’t all negative, though:

On the positive side, the toilet had the strongest, fastest, most violent flush in all my experience. Not one single clog the entire night (see my Baltimore Hyatt review for when things go wrong).

I think I’ll pass on the Baltimore Hyatt review.

Anyway, there are constructive negative and positive comments, to be sure — if you have time to parse the gazillions of comments. (Which begs the question: Who on earth has time to write these things?) If you read enough of them, you can pick out reasonable people who seem, at least with such limited information available, inherently more trustworthy than the whiners.

But there appears to be a crazy kind of nouveau-riche entitlement attitude out there. Take the great little Tex-Mex joint in our neighborhood, for instance. Nothing fancy. You go up and order at the counter, they bring it out. A modest but nice menu. Look on Yelp, and good lord, you’ll find some excoriating reviews because the kitchen forgot to hold the cheese on one order, or that the place isn’t up to Rick Bayless quality.

Plus, I’m suspicious because these online rating things — Yelp, Angie’s List, whatever — aren’t particularly careful or necessarily scrupulous in their methods. I used to work at an organization called Consumers Checkbook. Since the 1970s, Checkbook’s been rating services in the same way Consumer Reports rates products. Like Consumer Reports, it doesn’t takes advertising and it does take its methodologies very seriously. It’s use legitimate survey research, there is no ballot stuffing, and you’ll se detailed explanations for the methods and limits in every issue (and online).

So, I’m sticking with Checkbook and swearing off Yelp once and for all, just for the sake of my outlook on humanity. And I’ll part by Yelping Yelp:

This shoddy Web site has exhibited questionable ethics and reminds me of talk radio in that it draws out the worst elements of society, and somehow encourages even the better elements to behave like Leona Helmsley (you can look her up). I’d give it zero stars but Yelp forces you to give at least one.