There's a reason Karen is a meme

There are a real lot of very entitled people in the world that will complain on review sites and their opinion is not really justified. The only barrier is having an account and picking a number of stars.

In the past you had to be a restaurant reviewer, like you worked for Zagat or something, so there was a barrier to entry.

The same thing can happen to Uber and Lyft drivers too... If you are very unlucky and your first ride gives you a bad review pretty much forget about it.

I personally don’t go online and immediately sort by restaurants with 1 or 2 stars. I tend to sort by those with higher ratings.

Fake bad reviews by competitors and mean spirited people do know their actions have an affect on that business.

That's not the question that others are referring to. Everyone agrees that bad reviews affect the popularity.

The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". Yes, initial bad reviews are likely to affect the number of total reviews a restaurant receives. But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews. The press release says that the ratings of the initial reviews determines (causes) the total number of reviews and hence the eventual popularity of the restaurant, but doesn't explain how the researchers eliminated the apparently obvious alternative causal explanation that bad restaurants are more likely to get initial bad reviews, leading to fewer total reviews.

One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/23754931.2020.179...

A helpful move for new establishments—especially independent ones which don't have the organizing strategies of large corporations—would be to delay allowing comments for 3–6 months. I've worked in food for a long time, still do, and it's so difficult to have all aspects of an establishment in a good place at the outset. Give restaurants the time to work out those kinks before accepting comments.

The paper: As the number of reviews is statistically significant and positive in all of the regression models, the more reviews a restaurant receives, the higher rating it has.

The question was - how do they know it's the bad reviews that hurt the restaurants, or if it's actually the bad service (which caused the bad reviews) that hurts the restaurants.

They observe an effect - hurt restaurant - they see bad reviews - they blame the bad reviews. But was it actually the bad service (evident from the bad reviews) which hurt the restaurant?

The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.

I think the only possible thing is “what does the market think.” So the entire problem is correlation.

“Bad service” is, literally by definition, the name we give after the fact to types of service that correlated with bad reviews and low revenue.

at a minimum, the health department disagrees, re cooking and delivering food.

Once we went to a restaurant with hardly any diners, not at all busy. We ordered dinner. They served half our order. We waited for the other half. After about half an hour, we asked the manager. He went to investigate, and came back with the admission that they had forgotten to submit the other half of our order to the kitchen.

That's objectively bad service. I don't see how anyone could see that as "great service".

Now, maybe it was just an innocent mistake, someone having a bad day, and maybe the manager is really apologetic and offers some compensation and I forgive them. It would rule them out of consideration for a five star review, but I wouldn't give them one star just for that. Unless, if I had gone on a review site and saw a dozen other people complaining about the same restaurant messing up their order, then I probably would have left a one star review too.

I do feel like we shouldn't attach that to a real name that real people have, but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole" that convey the same meaning without lumping in unrelated people who so happen to share the name who have done nothing bad to anyone.

The origin of "dick" is, nevertheless, the name "Dick". Would you be satisfied if we went from "Karen" to "karen"?

I always think "douchebag" is quite good for this. You can really pile quite a lot of emphasis onto that first syllable for maximal invective effect.

I'm aware that John is an Americanism for the bog (toilet/WC.) John Doe is a person whose name is unknown in the US. A rubber johnny is just one nickname for a prophylactic. My mum used to call me Jonny or Johann or even Johannes as a sign of affection.

I'm not so sure that Karens are offended by the term Karen. You see, very few Karens are actually Karens.

People didn't start calling a toilet Jon because they wanted a label for the sterotype of an entitled asshole.

I guess its a form of virtue signaling. You have to be cool and know meems to know what calling somebody a Karen even means.

Should every possible characteristic a living entity can have also be a protected class?

Personally, I would only be worried if the “Karen” in question was comfortable calling the cops or “speaking to the manager” in a way that would reflect negatively on staff when they don’t deserve it. I don’t see many calling a white, middle-aged woman a “karen” for complaining about an overcooked steak when she ordered “rare”.

I am sorry people named “karen” are caught in the crossfire, but I would treat any resulting conflict as meaningful until you are able to listen to people using the epithet.

If you still have concerns, I probably do not wish to interact with them or you.

She finally admitted to me that it gets on her nerves greatly and she resents all of it. It came as quite a shock to me (because I find I lot of it funny) but I suspect there are a lot of Karens out there that aren't amused.

The kiddos and I have now resorted to calling her "K-Dog" which she gets a kick out of.

So, I’d say the same applies. If people called Karen don’t like the new association with their name, they can change their name.

Otherwise, sticks and stones.

Also, they’re not the ones actually being mocked here - I get grief from grown-ass adults over my name, directed at me - so frankly, I think anyone named Karen who sees this as a personal attack needs to either get over it, or change their name.

I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.

The whole political correctness idea isn't internally consistent anyway so you can't expect new concepts or words to be "correctly" fitted into it. It's just an arbitrary political ideology for people to latch onto.

And as an additional personal note, I can tell you that in Michigan I went to many smaller restaurants with one or two bad reviews that were great. If you actually read the bad reviews, you often see some utterly ridiculous shit.

But more often than not I go to a place that is rated very good but is actually not that good. And usually the bad rated places are indeed bad.

I'm truly astonished when I see businesses with 0-4 reviews on Yelp or Google Maps, but they're everywhere. Maybe some business owners just aren't paying any attention to online reviews? Seems trivial to get 4 people to write a review.