For Review

Monday, August 4, 2025

For Review

Just one? It looks so lonesome.

Everyone wants me to submit a review of their services nowadays. And I suspect that this doesn’t just apply to me, either. It’s not a request for my personal input because I’m such a sage and observant individual, or some bright young internet influencer. No, it seems that everyone wants to have a track record of good, above-average ratings for whatever they sell online.

There is a chapter-length discussion of user reviews and user ratings in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, a book that was discussed here some time ago. The data-processing machinery for taking impersonal, automated surveys has never been as cheap, either. So everyone from large corporations to small independent sole-proprietor operations would like some sort of user feedback—preferably positive—to display online for everyone to see.

Cialdini says that users are savvy enough to ignore sketchy user reviews that are a perfect five out of five stars on average and that come in large bursts on one date looking very similar. Users are aware that companies can cheat on the upside, at least, and arrange to have top reviews written by employees, trolls, or bots—and nowadays LLMs. They also realize that one-star ratings often come from unreliable sources like rival companies or grouches with an axe to grind. But reviews somewhere in between with comments suggesting real user experience might just be worth considering.

Nevertheless, for you and me as end-users of any product or service these days, we have to endure requests for instantaneous feedback on every single interaction, no matter how trivial. There seems to be nothing too mundane or insignificant that it would not merit a review. And that is what strikes me as increasingly odd as a part of everyday routine commercial interactions.

For years, product reviews were something that Amazon seemed to want all the time. More recently, everyone from Walmart at the self-checkout to utility companies at their customer-service call centers wants you to share your ratings of your most recent user experience. Often, they want you to share your ratings of products and services you haven’t even had time to experience. Their enticements for your ratings range from gift cards to sweepstakes registrations.

At the risk of making this into a cranky-old-man posting, the experience I have in mind deals specifically with Walmart, since that company seems to have increased its appetite for survey feedback. It started out with emails I received after shopping in their local stores. No purchase was too small or mundane for their feedback system to ask for my review. If I bought something as insignificant as a tube of toothpaste, the follow-up online survey asked about my thoughts on store cleanliness, product availability, and the checkout experience. (I did self-checkout and bagged my own products, and gave my work 8 out of 10. There’s always room to improve, I don’t care how good you are!)

Next, Walmart added a survey on the very self-checkout display itself—and followed up with an email asking me to rate the experience as previously. In one, I opted for the longer survey and commented that the survey experience took more of my time than the actual quick, single-item shopping trip. But the complaint was like tossing a grain of sand into the Atlantic Ocean for all the effect it had.

At this point, I’m going to start leaving negative reviews for companies that badger me into reviewing them. I’m going to complain that the constant requests—the pitiful neediness—for feedback and completing surveys detract from the whole experience, making unobjectionable commercial interactions into a nuisance.

What’s your solution?