Shop Owner Drives To Customer’s House After Bad Yelp Review

Image courtesy of A little Yelp from my friends...

A little Yelp from my friends…

After receiving his first negative Yelp review, the owner of a California store made repeated attempts to contact the disgruntled customer in the hopes of turning him into a gruntled customer, and ultimately ended up at the Yelper’s doorstep. But before you go looking for the shop owner’s mug shot, this is actually a good thing.

According to the AP, the customer had been displeased with some soaps purchased at the store and voiced said displeasure on Yelp.

Wanting to turn the buyer’s frown upside-down, the shopkeeper made offers to ship him replacement soaps, but got no response. So he tried again.

This time, the owner said he’d be in San Francisco — a two-hour drive from his store — and that he could drop off the replacement soaps at the customer’s home.

Meeting in person, the owner apologized and made a small request: “I asked him to make sure people knew about what we did.”

Which the customer did, going back to the shop’s Yelp page and editing his review up to five stars.

“It’s pretty rare that people will take accountability,” the customer tells the AP. “I was really impressed…. If he didn’t do this I would have never gone back there.”

We believe Yelp users should use the edit function for their reviews more frequently, especially since so many negative comments are written hastily in a moment of anger or disappointment.

In fact, we recommend that all Yelp users — and users of any site that allows and encourages social reviewing — go back a few days after writing a review and re-read their comments to see if they still feel the same about things in the cold light of day.

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