I don’t know Sara beyond the few details Yelp provides: She’s from a Pittsburgh suburb, she’s been writing reviews since 2010, and she gave the Grand Canyon one star. “Nothing here but desiccated bone dry just like California drought,” she writes, sounding like a modernist in need of a nap. “In awe for a brief 5 minutes and then the kids will realize it’s just rocks without entertainment, restrooms.”
I’m mesmerized by each of Sara’s 13 one-star reviews. In her decade-plus as an amateur critic, she has evaluated a sushi restaurant in Oregon (“The fishes were so smelly”), the city of San José (“School shootings at its best”), and a 24 Hour Fitness (“the scale was broken. the machines were broken. and Tom is broken”).
Yelp had been around for close to a decade before I ever read a review. A friend, a barista, told me he had been singled out in a one-star assessment and was worried he might be fired. The critic had been incensed about the wait time. “Doesn’t that come with ordering a pour-over?” my friend asked me.
I told him I’d write a five-star review to offset the negative score and, hopefully, prevent his termination, even though I knew I couldn’t do it under my name. I was teaching high school then and tried my best to remain anonymous online, scared my students might discover I had a personal life. I knew I’d need to defend my friend with an alias, though I didn’t know where to start. At the time, my go-to karaoke song was Sugar Ray’s 1997 hit “Fly,” so, as a tribute, I decided to write from the perspective of Mark McGrath, the lead singer of the band and the sometime host of television’s Extra. Mark loved the coffee shop. He especially liked my friend.
The change was immediate. My five stars effectively erased the stranger’s one, and my friend kept his job. With the Yelp app now on my home screen, I began looking up my other local haunts, horrified to find that they were also being unjustly maligned. Mark got to work, writing rave reviews for my corner bar, the after-hours taqueria, and Underdogs, a hot dog spot I’d never patronized but that had nonetheless earned my respect for its pun-filled menu. He bragged about touring with Crazy Town while he complimented the bar’s nachos. He quoted from his songs as he praised the taqueria’s chorizo. He even claimed he was living in a lair below Underdogs, that the universe had called him to move to the City of Brotherly Love.
As time went on, Mark went quiet, though I continued devouring one-star reviews, infuriated by their authors’ self-righteous diatribes. Why did they think they were the arbiters of the world? And why couldn’t they see that their criticisms affected real people with real livelihoods? I’d search for a favorite spot, then scroll to the bottom, looking for the pettiest grievances from the strangest accounts to hate-read. “Asshole,” I’d mutter. Then I’d read another. After a while, I was no longer indignant—I was curious. Who were these people?
Tom D’Ambrisi has some ideas. He’s the owner of the Butcher’s Block, a steakhouse in Long Branch, New Jersey, who replies to his one-star reviews on Yelp. Ralph, who said the restaurant’s security was disrespectful, is a “huge Pusssy. The biggest.” Greg, who complained about the temperature of his porterhouse, is a “world class ‘blowjob.’ ” Reputation management firms urge small business owners to respond to negative reviews in a measured tone, with apologies for poor service, but D’Ambrisi has no interest in appeasing people who would give one star. “You leave reviews,” he writes to Ravin, who noted the difficulty of securing a reservation, “because you don’t get what you want rite away.”
Not everyone responds to one-star reviews, though plenty of people enjoy laughing at their stupidity. Popular social media accounts like Subpar Parks and So Bad It’s Goodreads catalog humorously ignorant takes on national parks and works of literature. Every post has the same less-than-subtle subtext: Check out this idiot. I don’t follow these accounts, mostly because they feel redundant. Anyone who’s spent more than an hour online understands that the internet is filled with bad actors and worse opinions. Also of note: Water is wet.
Dunking on one-star reviews also ignores their practical purpose as a last resort for people who feel they’ve been conned. My friend Alanna wrote her first one-star review after a restaurant botched the reservation for the luncheon following her grandmother’s funeral. Since then, she has written 10 one-star reviews, each with a detailed description of how the business fell short of its obligation. For her, it’s always a simple equation. “I wouldn’t be writing it if they had done what I needed them to do,” she told me.
I understand why Alanna writes one-star reviews. I also understand why someone like D’Ambrisi might get angry enough to respond to them. Still, I’m largely uninterested in reading reviews that argue the quality of service. The one-star reviews I love, the ones that feel like actual literature, have little to do with commerce. In fact, they rarely seem like reviews. They’re part obscured confessional, part accidental poetry, containing writing that has been liberated from distractions like narrative, punctuation, and coherence. Like great fiction, they’re elusive and complicated. Unlike most of the internet, they’re remarkably human.
Scroll through Yelp and you’ll find Mikey, who left Florida for California only to be underwhelmed by the Pacific Ocean. “I’ll stick with pools that can be heated thank you very much,” he explains. And Emily, who couldn’t believe that people were so impressed with the “national disappointment” that is the Liberty Bell. “Not in a tower. Cannot be rung,” she writes, “AND it’s broken.” And Nicholas, whose summary of a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth is surprisingly masochistic. “Spent thousands just to have all the cast hit on my girlfriend. I hate this place,” he says in his one-star review of Disney World. “I will probably come back though.”
Sara’s take on the Grand Canyon is my favorite, though, and is the one that still bewilders me after all these years. I can’t understand how someone could stare into the Grand Canyon and find it less than immaculate. I can’t comprehend how someone could stand on the edge of the South Rim and complain about the lack of cell service. I messaged her on Yelp to learn more about her experience, but she never replied. By the looks of it, she’s disappeared from the site. Her last review is from 2016 and awards the city of Roseville, California, a relatively impressive two stars. “If you love desert life, bomb threats, don’t mind getting premature wrinkles, burn to a crisp for 6 months out of the year,” she explains, “you hit the jackpot.”
All I have is what she’s written—these unbroken walls of text stuffed with run-on sentences and trivial complaints. But I’ve found that’s plenty. Whenever I return to her Grand Canyon review, I notice something new. The most recent time, I was struck by her sudden apology: “Sorry but it feels like looking at dead mummies.” I tried to decipher why she lists the most common forms of death at the park (“heat stroke, drowning, or simply drive off the canyon”) and wondered if I should be concerned with the way she offhandedly notes: “Easy place to commit murder. Just push the dude over the cliff and no body find out.”
And that’s when I started to see her, exhausted after a day of direct sun and lying on a stiff motel comforter. The kids are asleep on a pullout. A local news channel buzzes in the background. She’s typing at a furious pace, unloading all of the day’s frustrations into the app’s small text box. “No plant, no life, it’s like a picture of death,” she writes, then pauses, remembering the feeling she had looking down at what seemed like an endless drop. She recalls how small it made her feel and how, to her surprise, she’d found the smallness comforting. “Even death,” she continues, “I guess there is beauty too.”
