Author: John Herrman / Source: New York Times
Illustration by The New York Times
I’ve been to the bagel place down the street from my apartment maybe a hundred times. The staff is friendly. I like the food. They’re always open.
Lots of people have their own opinions about it. Googling “Smith Street Bagels” produces pages of listings, most accompanied by star ratings visible right there in the results, in bright Google orange, from places like Seamless, Yelp and Google itself.
“I search maybe five or six sites every week, just to see what flow is going on,” said Juan Alicea, who manages the Brooklyn shop.Each website has its idiosyncrasies. Yelp reviewers write like restaurant reviewers. (“Yelp is where people like to complain,” said Mr. Alicea.) Foursquare users rate on a scale of 0 to 10, which Google converts to stars, and pass along tips. Reviewers at Find Me Gluten Free focus on the question of kitchen cross-contamination, which is more of an up-down sort of judgment, but those become stars as well. Mapquest’s reviews are pulled in from Yelp, though you wouldn’t know that unless you checked; they show up in Google results as Google stars. You may know that Seamless and GrubHub are the same company, and notice that they list the same star review, with the same number of reviews, but that would not explain why that rating appears three times in Google’s results, once under each service, and once under an ad.
The delivery apps present a particular problem: Seamless and GrubHub customers, even those who live close by, may have never set foot in the store, so their reviews may focus solely on the speed and ease of their transaction. And Smith Street Bagels, like many small businesses in New York, doesn’t employ its own delivery people. Instead, it uses a service called Relay, which matches delivery drivers with nearby restaurants.
“We can make a sandwich or an order within two minutes, but we still have to wait an extra 10 or 15 minutes for the driver to actually come to us,” Mr. Alicea said. “If the eggs get there cold, it’s a bad delivery for us.” This may also mean a bad review, which will be factored into the first star rating a Google searcher might see, not to mention into the rating in the Seamless app — a major source of revenue — and beyond. Last week, Mr. Alicea said, a dissatisfied Seamless reviewer left a review on Yelp. (While restaurants tend to bear the brunt of a bad Seamless experience, a sufficiently peeved customer will sometimes leave a review of Seamless itself in the App Store, on a five-star scale.)
In the case of the cold Seamless order, there is limited recourse for the restaurant. Aside from reaching out to the disgruntled reviewer to make nice, they can rate the delivery person on Relay. “It’s a five-star system,” Mr. Alicea said. “If you give them one star, you won’t get that driver again.”
My neighborhood bagel shop, in other words, exists in a world ruled by stars. Though ratings of this kind have existed for well over a century, the internet has given them new power to convey, and accomplish, countless different meanings and functions.
Star ratings, meant to serve as a shorthand for written reviews, now require significant context to be comprehensible. Three stars for a restaurant might be excellent or middling, depending on the platform. On Uber, a 4.3-star average might mean a driver is at risk of getting booted from the system, while on Amazon 4.3 stars might be the result of a hard-fought and expensive campaign to climb to the first page of the search results for “Bluetooth headphones.” A two-star restaurant might have mice, or its owner might have just made the news.
Stars are complicated fictions strutting through the world with a sense of meaning, tugged in every direction by forces over which they have little control, used and abused by systems in which they’re important until they’re not. Stars: They’re just like us!
The Amazon Experiment
Amazon is pushing the capacity of the star to its absolute limit. And interpreting its ratings, in 2019, a crucial but labor-intensive consumer skill. They’re category-specific: A three-star shirt might make your skin itch, or it might just have unusual sizing. A three-star masterpiece of a book might just have divisive politics. A three-star electronic device might work perfectly well, but ship slowly from overseas. You can’t really know unless you read the written reviews.
On Amazon, stars are influenced by less visible factors, too. For Amazon vendors and sellers, star ratings serve a variety of functions. Without reviews, a product isn’t likely to show up in searches; without a good star rating, it isn’t likely to be clicked at all. The stakes are high, and the stars themselves are more important than how they’re made. Vendors (those are products you see as “sold by Amazon”) can distribute their merchandise to semiprofessional reviewers through the Vine program, where users provide reviews in exchange for free products. Everyday sellers, for the time being, can’t. Competition is fierce. Options are limited. The inevitable result is fraud.
“You look at Amazon reviews before 2013, and…
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