ON THE BAR: Google reviews + surveillance states

hospitality in a time of fascism

Hello, friends.

There’s a video circulating on social media purporting to show a man calling ICE on restaurant staff because he didn’t like the service (to be fair, this is not the first time a patron was reported to threaten to call ICE on restaurant staff—just the most recent). I was recently contacted by the Boston Globe for an interview on a story they’re writing about how the industry can/should/might adapt to the loss of its undocumented workers (tl;dr: we can’t, it’s impossible, everything will shut down). Square, the point-of-sale company we use across all three businesses, and the preferred POS for the majority of small businesses domestically, has increased its transaction fees (not its credit card processing fees, which businesses pay Square in addition to transaction fees), from $0.10 to $0.15 per transaction, which might seem like nothing, but is actually quite something when you consider many independent retailers make a 10% margin, which means we typically only keep 10 cents on every dollar anyway. (Square is owned by one of the guys who started Twitter, and Vanguard, BlackRock, and FMR are major shareholders—for reference, the investment firm BlackRock manages more than $1 trillion in assets.) Farms are being denied federal grants crucial to their survival at the same time the cost of food is seeing unprecedented peaks. Tariffs threaten basically every aspect of operating a business, from the cost of food and wine to the cost of cleaning supplies and paper products. Trump told 26% of Harvard’s student population to transfer or face deportation. The psychic trauma of witnessing starving children in our feeds day after day weaves a thread of grief and despair through whatever hope remains.

Despite the turmoil, there’s one thing small businesses can rely on without fail: People are still finding the time to leave negative Google reviews.

People leave Rebel Rebel and Dear Annie a lot of negative reviews, mostly because of our service model, which I put in place during Covid, and which ensures our team gets paid even if someone doesn’t approve of our glassware. I find it funny (and hair-pulling maddening) every time I get an alert that someone has left yet another bad review because of our service-included model; ostensibly, this person can see the other two hundred some-odd reviews saying the same thing: “Everything was great, but they forced me to leave a 20% tip without telling me.” (We didn’t, there are signs about it everywhere you look, and if everything was great why don’t you want to pay for it?) I don’t waste my time trying to injure the livelihoods of small business owners, but I especially wouldn’t do it if it had been done several hundred times already.

Working in hospitality means subjecting yourself and your business to evaluation by non-experts on a daily basis. From the moment you open your doors every day, you welcome dozens (hopefully) of people with wildly different expectations, preferences, and biases to judge your performance, often based not on your expertise or abilities, but on whether they liked the chairs or wished you had more of something they wanted that you never promised you’d provide or whether they thought you might have used a tone of voice that triggered a part of them that was always made to feel small by their mother. It’s a wild world, but it’s the one we sign up for when we set up shop in this industry.

For a long time, I sort of wore these bad reviews like a badge of honor. Rebel Rebel is weird. Dear Annie is weird. Wild Child, as a retail space, is inherently less actively weird, but it’s still weird. I make weird places for weird people, and I always intended to, because I’m weird. I want other weirdos to have a place where they don’t feel weird. Or where they can be as weird as they want with other weird people. We aren’t for everyone, and that’s the point (please don’t misunderstand this—everyone is welcome, but we probably aren’t everyone’s cup of tea). As it turns out, most weirdos are also down with the systems we’ve set up that thwart the industry norms, from our communal spaces to our community organizing—and, yes, even our service models. So most of the time, it all balances out. We can rely on the weirdos.

Increasingly, though, things have started to feel a little more sinister, and it’s harder not to see these reviews as constant surveillance through the lens of our fascist decline. We’re not just reviewed on Google, after all; people can review us on Yelp (they hate us on Yelp, which is preferred mostly by the elder Gen X and Boomer set), on Resy, on Tripadvisor, on Facebook, on Reddit, on Eventbrite, and on Airbnb. The constant reviews run the gamut—people absolutely adore us or they wish for our speedy demise (“I hope they close” is a common invocation). Either way, every day and from every corner of the internet (and every layer of society), we are being monitored.

Of course, leaving a nasty Google review is not the same as outing your neighbors to McCarthy, but if the people are the nation, where does our responsibility to our communities begin and end? The results of these reviews have real consequences. And given everything happening in the world and the general (liberal) call for togetherness in the face of political oppression, why are we still willing to sacrifice the service industry on the altar of our egos? Unless someone actually harmed us, do we deserve to harm them?

Based on the vitriol spewed across Google, a lot of people think so, and it’s hard for me to believe it has nothing to do with the same extreme individualism that has contributed to our fascist decline. How else could we feel so emboldened to assume we are free from the moral consequences of harming our neighbors?

The frequency of our bad reviews has increased in the last few months; in some ways this makes sense, because people are financially squeezed, and the stakes for a night out are higher than they might have been six months ago. People are also stressed out in general, and hospitality spaces are the de facto emotional punching bags of society; the places where you can get dressed up and work your sense of powerlessness out on someone who is historically compensated to refill your water and accept the blows without complaint.

Recently, we received a bad Google review from someone I knew as a friend of a friend. I reached out to her via her professional website to let her know we were part of the same community, and to ask why she felt the need to trash us online, rather than giving the manager on duty the opportunity to address her misgivings. She didn’t reply; instead, she changed the name on her review and had her partner leave a one-star review as well. I don’t know what her plan is, as it’s highly likely we’ll be at the same birthday party within the next calendar year.

I thought about leaving her yoga practice a retaliatory one-star, too, but never finished the deed. I thought instead about my grandmother, who survived two World Wars and the subsequent Red Scare. She had a favorite, if not uncommon creed, that I used to think knelt too deeply at the feet of femininity and now understand with a bit more urgency:

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

EVENTS

We’ve posted our annual Pride celebration, and we encourage you to RSVP here. A reminder that’s it’s an afternoon, all-ages affair. There will be copious hot dogs and joy.

I’ve also posted a few weeks’ worth of classes, most with a focus on the queering of the wine industry, including a cheese-and-wine pairing class featuring the cheeses from local Roundtable Farm. But I’m kicking off this round with a Natural Wine 101 class this Thursday, as we have a lot of new folks in the shop who’ve asked for it.

Queer Trivia is also back at Dear Annie to kick off Pride month this Sunday! Join Pearl for a lively and hilarious afternoon.

And yes, I would appreciate a positive Google review if you’ve ever had a good weird time at any of our spots.

XOXO,

Lauren