I know, I thought of the same thing, and I did ask the "Bhindi" owner about that (voicemails) in 2009. He said that he had a bunch of emails from the marketing / sales guys, but he was wary of sharing it with me for obvious reasons. Most restaurants still live and die by yelp ratings, because people google a restaurants name and the 1st thing that comes up is the Yelp page, since most restaurants also do not have a decent website, if at all. So if someone sees 3* or lower at the top, they look for something else. "Bhindi" owner even told me that hipster yelp reviewers used to ask "extra chicken" in their 5$ Chicken Korma lunch box, and would threaten to write a low star review on yelp if they were not given it. I don't think Yelp has any control over such people or behaviour though.
Anyways, I had written to Kathleen Richards and remember connecting the two of them at that time, since it was way out of my league to investigate and report on something like this.
Few months after this story, Kathleen Richards wrote a follow up on her original story titled "Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up" which was a more or less "defensive story" because Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman critisized her original story and trashed her. That story is going to a 404, but I was able to pull it up from the Internet Archives => "Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up" https://web.archive.org/web/20090616170118/http://www.eastba...
Comments
I know, I thought of the same thing, and I did ask the "Bhindi" owner about that (voicemails) in 2009. He said that he had a bunch of emails from the marketing / sales guys, but he was wary of sharing it with me for obvious reasons. Most restaurants still live and die by yelp ratings, because people google a restaurants name and the 1st thing that comes up is the Yelp page, since most restaurants also do not have a decent website, if at all. So if someone sees 3* or lower at the top, they look for something else. "Bhindi" owner even told me that hipster yelp reviewers used to ask "extra chicken" in their 5$ Chicken Korma lunch box, and would threaten to write a low star review on yelp if they were not given it. I don't think Yelp has any control over such people or behaviour though.
Anyways, I had written to Kathleen Richards and remember connecting the two of them at that time, since it was way out of my league to investigate and report on something like this.
Few months after this story, Kathleen Richards wrote a follow up on her original story titled "Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up" which was a more or less "defensive story" because Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman critisized her original story and trashed her. That story is going to a 404, but I was able to pull it up from the Internet Archives => "Yelp Extortion Allegations Stack Up" https://web.archive.org/web/20090616170118/http://www.eastba...