Businesses have always lived by word of mouth, but in the old days the process was diffuse, hidden, incremental. Then Yelp kicked things up a few notches. It was bad news for bad businesses.
Some shopkeepers and restaurant owners have been railing against Yelp since it began. They say customers try to blackmail them — “I want a free dessert or I’m going to post a negative review.” They mutter that Yelp shakes businesses down for advertising. There is no evidence this is true, and lawsuits alleging it have gone nowhere, but the scenario nevertheless populates the comments threads on news stories about Yelp.
Now a Virginia carpet and rug cleaner is mounting a different sort of challenge to Yelp.
Hadeed Carpet, a business in a Washington, D.C., suburb, had a bunch of negative reviews, the kind that would make any potential customer keep walking. For example, Bob G. said Hadeed ripped him off when he was in desperate need of carpet cleaning. Chris H. said he sent his “precious Afghan and other rugs” to Hadeed, all of which they shrunk. “I was shocked by how they handled my situation,” Chris added. Several customers complained that final charges were double the estimate they had been given.
Hadeed asserts that Bob G. and the rest likely do not exist; presumably they were created by competitors trying to bring Hadeed down. That would remove the reviews from the protection of the First Amendment and make them defamatory. So it filed suit against the anonymous reviewers, and sought to compel Yelp to turn over their real names. If businesses could routinely do that with Yelp’s 47 million reviews, that might significantly undermine the site’s power.
“Hadeed Carpet services 35,000 customers per year,” wrote the company’s lawyer, Raighne Delaney, in a comment on a Public Citizen post about the case. “It advertises a lot. It is interesting that a few anonymous comments target Hadeed Carpet’s advertising repeatedly. Are these different posters, or one poster with different names? Hadeed Carpet has not been able to identify these people as customers. If they are customers, Joe Hadeed wants to know so he can fix whatever problem he has.”
A local court found in favor of Hadeed in late 2012, ordering Yelp held in civil contempt for failing to comply with the carpet cleaner’s subpoena. Now a Virginia appeals court has affirmed that ruling.
The appeals court noted that dissatisfied customers “have a constitutional right to speak anonymously over the Internet. However, that right must be balanced against Hadeed’s right to protect its reputation.”
As it stands, the ruling could open the door to a lot of lawsuits, at least In Virginia. “We feel this ruling fails to protect the free speech rights of Internet users, and in particular the rights of consumers who are turning to sites like Yelp to share their experience with a local business,” Yelp said in a statement. The site is appealing to the Virginia Supreme Court.
Hadeed has been in business for over 50 years. It would be interesting to get Joe Hadeed’s comments on the suit, in particular who he thinks has such a great interest in maligning him. But he did not return a request for comment.
A look at the Yelp page of Hadeed’s Alexandria location reveals 15 reviews. The two most recent are enthusiastic but most of the rest are pans. There are complaints about lowball price estimates, about a botched delivery and the actual work. “Carpets look worse after Hadeed ‘cleaned’ them,” one reviewer wrote.
Those in search of a more upbeat picture can easily find one on Hadeed’s own site. Dozens of reviews are there, just about all laudatory. “Their pickup crew was on time, professional, and sweet to our two kitties,” wrote Fran, who chose anonymity even though she had only good things to say.