More Complaints About Yelp Business Practices, Now In Chicago
The Yelp story is like a fire in a peat bog: it doesn’t go away, even when it looks like the flames are completely gone.
The newest chapter is based on allegations by Chicago store owners [via DCSmitty]:
[from Chicago proprietors add to Yelp allegations by Monica Eng]
Ina Pinkney of Ina’s restaurant in the West Loop said that last summer a Yelp salesperson offered to “move up my good reviews if I sponsored one of their events. They called it rearranging my reviews.”
The owner of More Cupcakes, Patty Rothman, said that last fall a Yelp Chicago staffer walked into her Gold Coast shop and “guaranteed us good reviews on the site if we catered one of their parties for free.” Offended but resigned, Rothman complied. And just as promised, positive reviews bloomed for the business right after the party, Rothman said.
Other Chicago businesses told the Tribune of similar experiences but asked to remain anonymous.
Despite denials by CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, the evidence is mounting, and if these widely distributed events are happening, the following would have to be true:
- Sales agents, working on behalf of the company, must have access to the Yelp publishing system, and are able, either directly or through company processes, to move or remove reviews.
- A culture of intimidation and excess has to have taken root within the company, where sales representatives either independently or in collusion with company executives are coercing free goods and services from store owners in exchange for improving their Yelp profiles.
While it is not clear whether these practices are really supported by Yelp management, it is growing hard to believe that management is totally in the dark, despite protestations of innocence.
I call on Yelp management, specifically Jeremy Stoppelman, to get to the bottom of these claims and to fire any that are committing acts like those alleged. They are immoral if not criminal. Transparency is required, not just another rah-rah blog post. At the very least, a serious, external and open investigation of these claims must be made, where the names of the sales people involved lead to something like legal depositions.
In the meantime, I am calling for a boycott of Yelp. We should have nothing to do with a service that appears to be operating like a Web Mafia, threatening store owners with the loss of their livelihood if they don’t pay protection money or cough up free food.
[Update: The Consumerist also reports on this, today.]
