I have a love/hate relationship with reviews. I use them myself for movies and books, and Rotten Tomatoes and I very much see eye to eye on what makes a good movie. But I rarely use reviews to assess restaurants, products, or services.
As a small business owner I've learned that customers are much more likely to write a negative review about a bad experience than they are to write a positive review about a good experience. And having been involved in some of the transactions that have triggered negative reviews for my company, I can confidently say the negative reviews can be very one sided.
What doesn't get the spotlight is the correspondence between the companies and the reviewers to try to turn a bad experience into a good one. Because that happens directly between the two parties - no platform, no audience, just one human reaching out to another. In a few cases, we've discovered through reviews that customers were unhappy with their merchandise and we've replaced the pieces. The customers are now very happy with both their new furniture and our service, but the reviews live on in perpetuity. And every once in a while a customer will drop out of a transaction with us because they read a negative review.
Of the thousands of transactions we've conducted over the last 15 years and thousands of positive experiences people have had with us, there are 38 reviews in various places, some of them very negative. And occasionally a customer will threaten to flood the internet with negative reviews if I don't agree to their terms. It's a bummer. Because most small business owners (me included) care deeply about what we do. We love feedback, we want to hear what you have to say, and information about how to contact us directly is easy to find.
Generally speaking, for every negative review you read about a small business, there's a founder and her team, mortified and scrambling to resolve the customer's issue. But the truth is, if that feedback was given directly to the business, the founder and her team would still be mortified and scrambling to resolve the issue. It doesn't usually take a megaphone to force a small business to do the right thing.
This experience has taught me to take reviews with several grains of salt, to give my feedback directly to the business if there's an issue, and to assume at all times that everyone is trying their best.
But I'll still use Rotten Tomatoes as my support system when deciding whether a movie is right for me.