I Put It To You, Greg

I need a fixed URL link I can send to the sales reps at Yelp, so I don’t have to always write the same explanation as to why we won’t be buying business membership (or whatever) from them. This post will have to do the trick.

The Yelp paradigm destroys the rich, personal relationships that create great business and great communities.

Yelp is destructive in that it overlooks the fact that a business and its customers are in partnership, and must work closely together to build an enterprise that is an asset to the community. In a healthy community, patrons and proprietor have a meaningful, ongoing, and respectful relationship where they together forge an ecology which serves everyone well.

The world of Yelp, on the other hand, is a place where businesses sell, consumers consume, and the patrons only involvement is in posting semi-anonymous “reviews” which celebrate or tear down the business, after the fact and well after the time that a meaningful relationship is likely to be built.

Some businesses are frustrated by what they read on Yelp, others are elated, and sometimes local folks start thoughtful websites to educate patrons about their work. But in every case, the people are robbed of opportunities to build something better, as the mentality takes hold that it the business’ job to guess and deliver what the consumer wants, and the consumer’s job to evaluate the experience after the fact.

Over time, communities where Yelp is influential will build and maintain fewer businesses that grow in concert with their patrons to serve real needs. Those communities will weaken and ultimately fail to sustain their members in a meaningful way.

We don’t want our community to become a place where workers and patrons view each other distantly and communicate only by semi-anonymous, unidirectional posts on a commercial web site. Our neighborhood, our friends, and our relationships with real people are too important to us.

Which brings up another point — public health researchers have found that strong, tight-knit communities with lots of interpersonal contact are a key foundation to physical health. Splintered communities where people are isolated from each other correlate with the so-called Western diseases and shortened life spans. I’m just sayin’, Yelp is killing our friends, our family, and innocent grandmothers down the street.

All joking hyperbole aside, seriously. We’re not interested in buying premium Yelp or whatever. Don’t feel bad, we don’t buy from Nestle either (now that we finally stopped buying Perrier/Pellegrino and started making our own sparkling water).

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