In my family, the first thing we look to when wanting to try a new restaurant are the online reviews and ratings. If the restaurant gets bad reviews or bad ratings, then we won’t go to it, it is as simple as that. Many people are the same way, and choose whether or not to go to a restaurant based on what it says online. Reviews have more power than we realize and a business may succeed or fail based on the types of things people say about it.

One very popular reviewing website is called Yelp. It has a variety of things that are reviewed, ranging from food and drinks to parks and stores. Yelp was founded in 2004 in San Francisco, California by a man named Jeremy Stoppelman. Yelp is one of the most widely used sites for feedback and rightly so.

Hearing from people who have gone somewhere and experienced it first hand makes the review more relatable for outsiders. Hearing from someone other than an owner or employee of the place makes the review seem more credible, considering it is not coming from someone that wants to endorse a certain product or company for personal benefit.

Although there are countless benefits to having sites like Yelp, there are also a lot of downsides to the website. Not necessarily for the people looking at the reviews, Yelp is a site that is for the people, but the business owners on the other hand, do not always benefit from it. A business can either fail or succeed based on what people choose to say about it. Bad reviews will get you no business, good reviews will get more customers, both new and returning.

To say that a review can break a business is an understatement, a bad review from the right person could potentially destroy a business and anyone who is involved with it could get a bad rap as well. An employee that is involved at a restaurant that received a review saying that the service was bad, could then lose their job and have a hard time finding another waiting job because people now think that they are bad servers. The same would go for the owner, if people say that their business is bad, no one will want to go to any company that they own.

A review is a reflection of what a certain company represents and shows, and can either help or hurt it depending on what everyone else chooses to say. They create a reputation for a business, and determine whether it will be a good or bad one.

Just because your waiter forgot a lemon in your water or took a little longer to bring your side of ranch should not be the reason you bash the entire business. Remember the power of a review when writing one, and keep them one hundred percent honest.