I just ordered some food, from a gyros place. It was decent. Edible. A bit expensive for what it was, if anything. I opened the delivery app and was asked for a review. I automatically went for 5 stars, then thought for a minute and switched to 3. It was OK food. Not great, not special in any way, not specifically bad in any way. Just…average. 3/5 average… The app instantly asked me “what was wrong with your order, was something missing?”.
The question is: how did we get to a point where 5 stars means “ok, or better”, 4 stars means “kind of meh”, 3 and below means bad?
Edit: I got a lot of comments saying I left a delivery person a bad review for bad food. No, I didn’t. The app I use most often is Bolt food. It’s popular at least in eastern Europe and it asks separately about the driver and the food.
Comments
I think 5 stars means “I was happy with this transaction”
in your case, it sounds like the food was bland.
Unfortunately the climate is that businesses unrealistically think all service should be 5 star service even if they are not set up to offer 5 star service.
they often take it out on the workers even if its basic things like understaffing or poor quality product that is causing a mediocre service so there is social pressure to not give below 4 or 5 stars
Airbnb’s entire business model is based on getting nothing but five-star reviews.
I think some of it has to do with fast and lazy metrics. Trying to parse out a “mostly satisfied, but…” review is hard. “Food GOOD.” or “Food BAD.” Way easier. Not more accurate, but easy.
Because businesses treat anything less than five stars as a negative review, which is counted against the employee even if they had no opportunity to do better.
Every business wants to consider what they are doing to be perfect and worthy of 5 stars. After living in that climate for so long, we’ve gotten used to the idea that 5 stars basically means everything was operating as normal. Anything less than 5 stars means something was actively wrong.
Giving 3 stars hurts the business rating. I always check reviews and I will not go to a restaurant whose rating is 3 stars. We are not part of a Michelin rating team. Five stars indicates that you were satisfied with the order and service. If there was nothing wrong, at least give 4 stars.
5 stars means it was passable and anything under likely counted as a “0” in their system.
In Japan they’re much more honest with online reviews. Usually anything over a 3.5 means it’s good
If you can rate 1-5 and no instructions, then I always assume that 3=satisfactory.
2/4 is below/above expectations.
1/5 is exceptional bad/good.
You really needs to work for a 1 or a 5…
Unregulated markets have all sorts of dishonest representations. A large part of this is likely built on juking the stats.
Analytics folks, MBAs, and the corporate teams got us all to this point where absolutely everything needs to be highly optimized to maximize profits. There’s no room for sub-5 scores in a world run by people whose brains work that way.
I rate on everything from the food, the service, the employees and the general atmosphere of the joint. Even if the food was average but the joint was what made everything enjoyable, I would at least give 4 stars.
If everything was very basic, I’d be hard pressed to leave any kind of rating at all.
To be honest, I’m just plain fed up with being asked to review everything.
Was the food spectacular? Was this dish good? What about that dish? What could we have done better? How about the delivery? Was the handoff perfect?
Was your chiropractor visit wonderful? One a scale of 1-5?
Was the dentist exciting?
I’m exhausted from filling out report cards.
Did you go to the bathroom today? Was your poop everything you expected?
Anything below a 4.7 gets people fired. 5 stars means “food not poisoned, delivery person did not assault, attempt to assault or otherwise threaten me in any way, packaging showed little or no evidence of methamphetamine residue/bodily fluids/animal hair”.
These systems are badly designed, but there are real consequences for the businesses/employees. Anything less than a 5 star rating on an Uber could get someone fired, but I’m not going to give someone 3/5 because they drove too slow or their car smelled weird, because it’s not that serious. Same thing for a Doordasher or Amazon small business. I see lots of people tanking Amazon seller reviews because a package arrived damaged, when that is more likely to be the shippers fault. That can really hurt a small business, but I don’t expect the buyer to know that. I expect Amazon to design a better system.
I personally like a thumbs up/thumbs down system for this purpose, but even that wouldn’t address everything. Until that’s the case I either do 5 stars or don’t rate, unless I want to warn other consumers.
If I saw a restaurant had 3 stars, I wouldn’t go there. 3 stars means “this wasn’t the worst, but there was definitely some things wrong with it.”
4 stars is for “quite good but maybe a little bit was wrong”. Sometimes it’s not serious though. 4 stars might be “good except it was way overpriced”, or “good except I found it too noisy”. That’s not too bad, I would be able to gauge for myself if I cared about the high prices or the noise.
2 stars is “this sucked except I give them credit for a small redeeming quality.” 1 star is “this was the worst”.
Also, because so many people automatically give 1-star and 5-star reviews with little thought behind it, reviews with 2-4 stars are given more weight, by both businesses and customers. A 2-4 star review often means that people who gave this review really thought about what they thought was wrong, and why they didn’t want to give it just a 1-star or 5-star. So a business would see this and would want to know what made the customer feel that way, and how to improve.
When a delivery app asks for a rating, they are asking about the delivery.
Did the food get to you in a reasonable time based on what the app said you would receive it? If so, five stars. If not, what was wrong about the delivery?
If you ordered from a mid restaurant, you’re going to get mid food. That isn’t something the driver can control.
Even if you were judging the food , you are judging the food based on what you ordered. A McDonald’s can easily be 5 stars for a McDonald’s experience. You shouldn’t 2 star a McDonald’s just because it isn’t an organic grass fed wagyu beef burger because that isn’t a reasonable expectation.
It does suck. It’s all tied to a system called a Net Promoter Score, where the scale is like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NetPromoterScore-NPS.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
I want the scale to be 3 is average, 5 is well above average, 1 is abysmal. But companies use it like you have seen, where anything less than a perfect score means something was wrong. Big companies use this kind of system to rank and review employees, too. It sucks.
If your rating in a delivery app, aren’t you rating the driver?
I just stopped reviewing anything unless it really was outstanding and worth 5 stars.
Oil change?, grocery store?, fast food?, coffee? Why does every business think you owe them a review for just doing what their business requires?
Honestly at this point we’re back to a standard 10-point scale with 4.0 being 0 and 5.0 being 10.
4.5 = 3 stars
Because there are really only two ratings: zero stars and five stars.
There’s no way I’m going to a place with three star reviews.
Just don’t rate if you don’t feel like it. I never do the ratings because personally it feels kind of weird to be rating people like uber drivers.
Metrics are all or nothing, 5 stars is “good” 1-4 stars is “bad”
There are really only 3 options: 1 star, 5 stars, and leaving no review at all . The way I see it, leaving low review at all is the new 3 star review
First, food from a gyro place is never considered 5star so then you have to ask, is it 5star for a gyro place?. 2nd once it’s delivered it automatically loses a star because it’s never as good as if you ate it there, but that’s your lazy ass fault not the restaurants. 3rd you ordered from a 3rd party app not the restaurant who probably doesn’t deliver anyway for the reason that delivered food is never as good and this 3rd party app doesn’t care about the quality of the food it’s delivering. So, that’s why 3 stars is 5 stars now.
Because in a capitalist corporate society that is dependent on raising revenue every single period, the workers are also given superhuman expectations.
Anyone in customer service is expected to exceed expectations for every single customer. You are supposed to give maximum effort and 110% every moment you’re at your job. They don’t want you doing a standard job, you’re supposed to WOW the customers and if you’re not Exceeding Expectations, you’re not meeting expectations.
For instance, take ride share and delivery couriers. Did you know literally every single rating that isn’t a 5 star is a vote for them to get fired? If they fall below a fairly high threshold, they’re deactivated (usually around 4.2). That can be a number you can count on one hand of scammers rating 1 for free food.
Companies will give a BIT of wiggle room out there because there are always going to be the obstinates who won’t rate anything 5 because “nothing is perfect”, but there is NOT a lot of wiggle room anywhere in the customer service industry.
TL;DR, anything other than a perfect score is quite literally a vote to fire whoever worked with you.
Japan uses 3 stars for expected service, you won’t find many restaurants with 4.5+ stars. It’s a cultural thing, in the US less than 5 means something bad.
Honestly, I think I hate the rating culture even more than the tipping culture
I absolutely hate this crap. If everything is five stars then the rating means nothing anymore.
Why does every online order ask for a tip? If im picking it up, i shouldnt have to tip, just like i dont tip mcdonalds, or asked to at a drivethru. 5 stars to me should mean awesome for price, flavour, portion size
If you don’t have any actual constructive criticism for how they can do better then why bother leaving a 3 star review? That’s a bit harsh. 3 stars is like a D. As someone who used to do door dash and Uber and stuff I always rate 5 stars unless there is a real reason as to why I shouldn’t
Back when I worked at Target they drilled onto us that for reviews and surveys, a 10 is the goal, 9 was acceptable but meant you could do better, 8 was mediocre, and anything 7 or lower was a failing score.
It was ass backwards because it meant management would have to talk to you any time a normal sane person who understands how scales work gave you what they felt was an honest rating, but it did teach me how corpos think and that it’s better to just not bother with a survey unless you’re rating maximum.
Why are we leaving 5 star reviews? Because that’s the only score corporate culture understands.
Lots of companies use reviews as a way to surveil their employees, so I never review things. Let the managers do their own “administration” and leave me out of it.
5=1, and 1-4=0
We ain’t trying to get the employees punished over corporate’s obsession with metrics.
It’s not that a 3 is actually bad, but anything less than a perfect score means there’s room for improvement.
Your star rating is based on expectations for that place. It is not to rank it against different types of resturants. They aren’t Michelin Stars. 5 stars if it’s as expected, food was good for price, customer service was satisfactory, place was clean etc. They aren’t asking if you like McDonald’s or burger King better.
Take away stars for dissatisfaction.
This is r/USDefaultism in my brain. For me it’s:
1 star – terrible, wouldn’t feed this to my enemies
2 stars – bad, would not order again (or: you get one chance to improve on a calmer day)
3 stars – decent, good, would order again, would not recommend to other people generally, but I’m not afraid to order this when people are coming over
4 stars – nice, awesome. If people ask for recommendations I’ll mention you.
5 stars – outstanding, no mistakes to be found. Will recommend to anyone willing to listen.
In my experience, US companies that deal with Dutch customers do not understand that this is how most of us think.
Because as a product / service / business rating gets further away from 5* consumers buy less and less of it.
Source: I was a large seller on Amazon for several years. And it was widely known that slipping from 5 to 4.5 would hurt sales. Slipping from 4.5 to 4.25 hurt them even more. And god forbid you get below that then that product is going to have a hard time moving.
Whether you think it’s right or wrong – every time you rate something below 5* you are (usually) hurting that small business. They’d appreciate it if you just didn’t leave them a rating at all in that case.
Personally I never rate something below 5* unless it was clearly inferior quality / really bad service / etc.
This has always been a peeve for me. Anytime anything other than 5 stars is considered a failure. 3 stars should be normal and 4 exceptional and 5 perfect and far exceeding expectations.
Customer service agents have to maintain 5 stars which isn’t fair. I know that if I don’t rate an order or CS call 5 stars I’m getting someone in trouble.
Don’t get me started with fucking Uber and 5.0 ratings. I guarantee no Uber driver is exceptional and perfect which is what 5.0 should mean. But I know I’m fucking them over if I leave them a 4 star when I had a good ride.
It’s a North American thing – people feeling bad if they don’t give perfect marks. And so now it’s become the norm and people can lose their jobs for lower ratings, so everyone does it.
It’s the same with tipping – it’s become mandatory and not an actual evaluation of the setvice. Good thing tipping is mostly in person and not on a platform.
Don’t give the fuckers any information and give your rider 5 stars.
Where have you been ?
It’s cultural here. For example, in Japan 3 stars is considered perfectly fine and good, with four being exceptional and five as immaculate/the best in town. Americans have little ability to take or give helpful criticism and feedback, IMO. We take things personally and do not want to hurt people’s feelings so five stars are given and expected in mediocre circumstances.
5 stars would be everything going as expected, and everything that the business can control being controlled. If it’s ok food but decent value for money that’s 5 stars. Hell if it’s bad food but dirt cheap that’s also five stars. If it’s high prices but just ok food maybe 3 or 4.
I don’t fill out employee surveys for businesses. Ever. Some pencil neck managers got it in their heads that anything less than five stars is lacking in some way. That is complete BS. Five stars is perfection and perfection rarely exists in restaurants and retail. I’m not going to lie about less than perfection to let some manager pump his figures and I’m not going to be honest about my experience because said manager is going to use it to deny a bonus or raise to an employee that is doing their job as well as can be expected.
I rate accordingly. I always say to get a five you gotta give me an out of this world experience. 🤷🏻♂️
I have an episode of Black Mirror that can help explain.
Because when leaving reviews it’s either 0/5 or 5/5, there’s no in between. There’s two scores. That’s it. Corporate fucksticks with no knowledge of practical application swing their clipboards around and come up with these half baked dribbling ideas like “oh no! 3/5 means only average and we have to excel in every possible way or were failing as a company!”
It’s the same clipboard wielding twats who say that then you have a review as an employee, you can never get 5/5 because “there’s always room for improvement, lolz!”.
We’re basically living in an episode of black mirror at this point. Social scoring will be along shortly.
I work as a teacher online. If my rating drops below a 4.5 / 5 rating, I won’t get students. It’s everywhere now, and it messes people up. In my field, if you’re uneducated and teach the student nothing but they like you, it’s OK rather than trying to correct their mistakes, which could risk you getting scored low and losing students. It’s honestly ridiculous and my ratings come from kids which makes it even worse!
I disagree with your premise. I think you believe you’re reading a lot of people’s minds and are assuming this is the case
I remember when eBay first started taking off and that was the first time I was ever asked to rate a transaction. Sellers would absolutely lose their minds if you gave them less than a 5 and would leave negative reviews back against the Buyers. Those lower reviews could impact whether other Sellers or Buyers would agree to do transactions with you. So basically we were all bullied into leaving perfect reviews and it spiraled out from there.
I think a five star is in order if you got what you expected. No more no less. The three star makes it sound like they underperformed.
I work in a restaurant,
it’s expected for us to get 5 star ratings and anything less will be flagged against us and the people on the shift. We get a weekly report of our ratings and if our average star rating is below a certain number then we’ll get yelled at.
If we get a even 1 star review in a sea of 5 stars that also gets reported to us and we have to do something about it.
It’s not entirely robotic though because if someone leaves a 3/5 star review and says it was great with 0 complains we’ll sometimes ignore it
I give the person that delivers 5 stars every time because the delivery apps penalize people if they get too many non 5 star reviews. I only rate the restaurants that I actually love, everything that’s like mid or below I just font rate at all (unless there was something truly disgusting or wrong).
I’m a long time restaurant person and reviews can make or break a place so I try to only say nice things and if I can’t I say nothing.
I don’t have a problem reviewing businesses poorly but I almost never give anything but 5 stars to the delivery person because they know where I live.
You leave reviews? They’d have to pay me for that.
Right now, I only have time to worry about the billionaires robbing us blind without consequence. I’m giving every other working soul a pass for now.
Because we want the middle class workers to not be harassed by corps for not getting them 5 star reviews.
Giving 3 stars for exactly what you wanted is kinda shitty
When I worked at a major bank, for the five responses in the survey, getting 5-5-5-5-4 was treated the same as getting 1-1-1-1-1, and my quarterly bonus was directly tied to those surveys.
I was wondering the same thing! First time I took a Lyft, I left a 4-star review because the driver was a little reckless at times but mostly good, and the app immediately goes “got it! We’ll never give you this driver again!” That’s not what I said?
Today I bought a bagel and a coffee from a chain restaurant. I sat down for 25 minutes read the news, and enjoyed a calm moment. This cost $6. The bagel was warm, with a slight crunch from the toasting. The cream cheese was cold, tased great and perfectly portioned. The coffee was fresh, hot, and the cream and sugar were generously available. I enjoyed a refill for the road on my way out.
I got an email from them asking to rate them.
The only part of this experience that DID NOT meet my expectations was receiving the survey. Don’t clutter my inbox you twats!
How do I express this in the confines of the survey?
They are tracking me anyway, why not use the data points of the frequency of my return to this establishment as an indicator of customer satisfaction?
I think people sort of feel guilty for taking off any stars, as if it’s unkind to the folks running or working at the business. Or they feel like they need something specific to complain about in order to justify taking off a star, rather than just ‘it was average’.
Personally I don’t hesitate to leave exactly the rating that reflects my experience, because I consider it a scientific duty: I’m contributing to a dataset, and anything other than an accurate rating would contaminate the dataset.
This is why I don’t fill out the surveys from my auto repair shop. A.) My time has value. B.) Your boss is going to consider anything less than 10 a fail. I don’t give out 10s. If they continue to badger me, I will happily give them 5s across the board.
I hate this so much. 5 stars should be really, really, really great. 4 should be really great, 3 stars, normal. Where most will fall into should and would be between 2 and 3.
If I give you 4 or 5 stars, you have out done yourselves. Congrats.
3 stars. . Most excellent. I will order here again. 2 stars, meh, I will most likely be back though as I like this place.
1 star or less, please go out of business.
3 stars is average. 5 stars is exceptional. 1 star is trash. Least that is what it should be.
If you are going by the stars, make sure you read the bad (1or 2) reviews first. Many times, they are petty or idiotic complaints and should be ignored. My business once got a 1 star review stating that we got their whole order wrong, and forgot the fries and the meat was raw. We not only aren’t a restaurant, we literally have nothing to do with food. Idiots abound.
Tell your wife she’s 3 stars. See what happens.
I always took the 5 star review to mean “this is the scale from terrible to realistically the best possible” which in most cases, would mean a 5 is fairly average all things considered, because the service itself is just incompatible with not much above average. How good can mac and cheese get before it’s not fast food?
It’s basically a relative scale, instead of an absolute one. I think most people would agree that McDonalds, most sit in restaurants, and hotels, are average or slightly below average in terms of comparing against everything they’ve ever been to, but when comparing them to themselves, it’s about the best possible service possible.
Maybe I’m just bullshitting though, but I don’t think it’s as evil as other commenters are making it out to be.
The idea is that you start with 5 stars and knock off stars for errors. There isn’t a mechanism for “above and beyond” – if the service ticked all the boxes that you expect for that service, it’s five stars. Anything which only ticks some of the boxes is a partial success for fewer stars.
And it’s been this way at least since the 1990s.
I don’t. 3 stars is normal, 4 means something caught my attention 5 you were amazing above and beyond.
I’m not leaving 5 star reviews. When I leave a review, I leave an honest one.
Also, on a related note: this “5 stars or it sucks” mentality is what ruined Netflix’s recommendations engine. RIP.
Maybe we should include the overall distribution of scores, and report the percentile. That will make more sense and standardized the results.
As a person fluent in statistics, i hate 5 star reviews.
The same reason YouTube went from a star rating to a thumbs up/down system years ago. People almost always rate 1 star or 5. Liked or did not like. Good or bad.
Don’t be that guy.
Yes it’s stupid that 5/5 means good enough and anything less means bad, but when you take your stand and answer 3/5 you don’t change the world, you just make some underpaid foot soldier get it in the neck because their metrics look worse.
This is why I stopped doing these when requested – they are bullshit!
Maybe if I’m going to get a discount or coupon, but otherwise – I don’t bother.
It’s kind of like they’re expecting a participation award. I rarely give anything five stars unless it actually is exemplary. When it comes to food just showing up and being edible is three stars. Tasting fantastic and presented well is five.
This is why I stopped reviewing anything unless it deserves 5 stars or 1, but no in between. Even then, I have to feel pretty strongly about that thing to bother.
I don’t trust anyone that has only 5 star reviews, though. That just tells me that those reviews are carefully curated or extracted from people in annoying ways if they are legitimate at all.
As others have pointed out, as annoying as it is for businesses to get less than 5 stars, it can get me deactivated as a delivery driver. I genuinely have to be concerned anytime I get 4 or under, and a 3 or under it’s like I ran over their dog or something. An average of 4.7 or less causes me to literally lose work from Instacart! Luckily I have a lot of 5s to cushion the occasional 1-3 ratings from customers who are mad about the prices, out of stock items, pouring rain when they don’t have a roof to put their bags under, etc. It’s infuriating that I can lose a job for things out of my control and a low/non tipper having a bad day.