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You've Been Yelped

Yelp, the rambunctious and burgeoning customer-review website, can make or break a small business. It can also drive a business owner slightly insane.

Timothy Archibald

The Founders and Their Army Russel Simmons (left) and Jeremy Stoppelman, plus a few of the hundreds of thousands of Yelpers who post regularly on their site.

On October 30, 2009, Diane Goodman logged on to Yelp.com. Like many business owners in cities across the country, Goodman had lately developed a small obsession with the website, which allows customers to publish critiques of local businesses. She had been visiting her company's Yelp page every day to see what her customers had written about her bookstore. Goodman found reading Yelp reviews to be emotionally wrenching -- but she also couldn't look away.

Scanning the page, Goodman discovered that an amateur critic -- a Yelper -- had written a new review of Ocean Avenue Books, the small store in San Francisco where she is the owner and sole employee. Over the previous few years, Goodman's store had received a handful of reviews on Yelp. Most of them were positive, but they often contained just a touch of cruelty. For instance, there was the customer who gave her five stars out of five but went on to describe her store as "poorly lit, mothball infested, disorganized, and a bit chaotic." Another described Goodman as "a sweet lady" but also recommended that she give the store "a good cleaning."

"I know it's a mess," Goodman says, showing me inside the shop, a 650-square-foot box with tall shelves and haphazard stacks of paperbacks blocking the aisles. "But it's just me working here." Goodman is 49 years old and has an easy smile. She opened the store, at a different location, in 1992. "I have the kind of business where I get really close to my customers," she says. "I'll spend hours talking to people who are lonely. That's the job."

But a few years ago, the job started to change. Whereas before dissatisfied customers might have complained directly to Goodman or simply gone away, now they were seeking relief on the Web. "In the past, if someone was difficult, you could just tell them to leave," she says. "But you can't do that anymore. You talk to someone, and a couple of minutes later, it's on Yelp."

Goodman began reading the latest review. "This place is a TOTAL MESS," wrote somebody who went by the handle Sean C. "I think this place needs to close down for a few days and do a thorough cleaning and organization and get rid of all the crap!"

Goodman was angry -- yet another review about the mess -- and she decided to let Sean C. have a piece of her mind. She clicked a link on Yelp's website, opening a tool that allows business owners to send messages to reviewers. "Why don't you come in here and say it to my face?" she wrote. "Are you too much of a coward?" She told him that she knew who he was -- so few people came into the store that it was obvious -- and that the store was a mess because sales were slow. Over the next few hours, she sent several more angry messages. She warned of a "world of pain." "Goodbye pussy boy I will be contacting your employers," she said. And: "Your mom was a bitch and she didn't teach you how to behave. That's why your life is such a mess right now."

Sean C. went back to the Yelp page for Ocean Avenue Books, amended his review of the store, and attached the e-mails. He also attached the e-mails to a post on Yelp's message boards under the subject "Getting threatening and crazy e-mails from business owner." Dozens of the amateur critics who write reviews on the site jumped to his defense. Someone named Morgan M. wrote, "That owner is fucking crazy," and Patricia H. wrote, "Wow, what a nut job!" A few attempted to defuse the dispute. "Leave the small [companies] alone," wrote Verona N. "They are already struggling to keep their heads above the sea of large businesses."

For two days, Goodman was transfixed by the discussion -- and she started to get paranoid. "I couldn't tell if the people coming into the store were real customers or just people who were going to say something about me on Yelp," she says. A customer would ask an innocuous question -- for instance, "How long have you been open?" -- and Goodman would panic, fearing that her response might become fodder for yet another Yelp comment. "I was saying to myself, 'Come on; that's crazy,' " she says.  " 'Don't think this way.' "

At the end of the second day, she decided to end the crisis by apologizing. She figured out Sean's last name -- Clare -- with a Google search and found his address in the white pages. His house was just two blocks from her store. She walked up the stairs to his front porch and, at 6 o'clock on a Sunday evening, knocked on his door.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued. Goodman says she started to explain that she had come to apologize for her e-mails and was attacked; Clare says Goodman began yelling, forced her way into his house, and refused to leave. In any case, the two became entangled, grappling until Goodman fell down the steps. When she hit the ground, Clare ran back inside and slammed the door. The police arrived a few minutes later.

They told her she would be booked for battery and remanded to San Francisco General Hospital for a mental health evaluation. She sat and listened, bewildered. Since when, she wondered, was it illegal to knock on a neighbor's door? And why, after all the nasty things that had been said about her in public, was she the one being punished? Wasn't she the victim here?

More than anything, she blamed Yelp. Out of nowhere, the little company had somehow managed to get between her and her customers. It had hurt her business and caused her to humiliate herself, first online and now, improbably, in the real world. "I've never met any store owner who likes Yelp," Goodman says. "We're all gritting our teeth. It's evil."

Everyone's a critic. The cliché has long been a useful way to brush off a caustic remark or a biting comment. But now it's true -- and it's driving entrepreneurs crazy.

Read more:

How to Handle Online Criticism

How Businesses Can Respond to Criticism on Yelp

Max Chafkin

Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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