Please Leave a Review! (Or Else)

The ladies at Walmart have been pressuring me a lot lately. I don't like to be pressured, I tend to do the opposite of what I’m being pressured to do.

I don’t usually go out of my way to shop there, but there is a Walmart within convenient walking distance of my office. So, many days I wander over there to get a salad and a Diet Mountain Dew for lunch. As you know, there are very few people behind an actual cash register at Walmart – or any other major chain store for that matter – so I head through the self-checkout. For the most part, I don't mind self-checkouts, but I miss their original purpose of letting people with only a few items get in and out of the store quickly. Now, you usually have to wait until the family with the two shopping carts loaded with groceries to slowly scan each of their items and bag it.

Although almost no one I know likes this new normal, it does not matter. Apparently, Walmart has done the math and the amount of stolen goods does not exceed the amount they would have to pay actual people to scan and bag my goods. To be fair, though, even in the old times, Walmart never had kids bagging groceries. However, there are some items Walmart sells that need the approval of another human being, lest we make it out of the store with our cold medicine unfettered. There are associates on hand to check identification to assure that I am responsible enough to take a Sudafed.

Hence, the Walmart ladies. I’m sure there are some stores that have men take up this important duty, but at this one it is always women. Let the record show that I have zero issues or interest in this gender stereotyping, it's just something I have observed. For the most part, I do not interact with these people. I’m not an unfriendly person, but the four or five on them watching over the Self-Checkout usually are more interested in chatting with each other. It only becomes an issue when I have to flag them down to come over and scan their ID and push the screen that lets the machine know that I am, indeed, over the age of consent to buy cold medicine.

This minimal human contact does not bother me one bit, even though I do tend to take issue with the old guy in the blue vest eyeballing me at the exit as if I am some sort of master criminal. One could say that the Self-Checkout is perfect for those of us who just really are not ready to confront the world so early the in the morning. On the positive side, the scanning machine will talk to me, but it never really expects me to say anything. It is more interested in my actions, reminding me to put my merchandise in bags and to pay.

Normally, I don’t think much about this whole process, it’s just another part of modern living. But there is one part of the experience that I find especially annoying is that once my transaction is complete, a screen comes up asking me to rate my experience at Walmart. Usually, I ignore this prompt because it is a useless exercise. Walmart could not care less about how my shopping experience really was. If they did, they wouldn't lock all their merchandise in glass-cabinets and force their customers to try and find someone with a key.

Walmart is not the only company interested in my rating. In fact, just about every transaction is not complete until a review is given, or ignored. However, some brilliant Walmart district manager somewhere decided to have stores compete to see who can get the most Five-Star Ratings at the Self-Checkout. And, as any plumber's son would know, shit rolls downhill. Now, instead of ignoring me liked usual, the ladies of Walmart are confronting me and pressuring me to touch the screen and give Walmart a Five Star Rating.

When they have successfully badgered someone into doing that, they announce it to the others as if they were scoring the winning touchdown in an important game. I find the whole thing unseemly because of the position it puts me in. I just came in to get a soda and a donut, not be involved in some office politics. I have enough of that in the office I work in. What it comes down to is that I really don't care for this whole rating system our world has turned into.

It started online with Amazon and Yelp and now it is ubiquitous. I had to have some painting done a couple of weeks ago and found the work to be satisfactory. I did not, however, leave a review anywhere and the painting company has sent me three emails asking me to, please, leave a review. On occasion, at work, I am required to sit in on online conferences on forums, after which I am expected to answer a few survey questions. None of the choices for answers includes "I was bored to tears and was doing something else during the presentation." Everything I order on Amazon is followed by an email asking me to rate my experience.

As a writer with books for sale on Amazon, I know it is important to have reviews. The more reviews you have, the more Amazon pushes your stuff. Although I don’t mind asking folks to buy and recommend my books, I rarely push them to leave a review. I suppose I find the reviews I do get to be more valid because I didn’t pester it out of anyone.

I rarely give a rating on anything, because it’s just a numbers game with very little real meaning. Having a little experience with corporate quality management, I know that customer feedback is one of the table legs for a quality management system. The truth, though, is that you rarely hear from your customers unless it is negative, and, rarely, if it is positive. That a product or service does what was advertised usually isn’t cause for much more thought. Why rate something when it did what they said it did?

But to keep a quality rating, you have to have that feedback, which leads to pressure on customers to rate your service.

It should be noted that online culture has deemed that ratings are important in that they bring in more customers. I can’t say if this is right or wrong, but there are a large number of people who will not shop at a place that has poor reviews. That leads to rating inflation – both positive and negative – where ratings are bought and sold. In turn, this leads to a weaponization of negative reviews, in which a small business can be destroyed because someone doesn’t like the service or the owner or politics. Apparently, all of this works because the rating system of doing things doesn’t seem to be abating.

Still, that doesn’t mean I have to participate in it and I rarely do. My question is: How do you explain all that to a Walmart lady who is pestering you for a Five Star Review after you did all the work on the transaction? I can’t prove it, but I doubt she cares that much whether my shopping experience was satisfactory, she just wants the $50 gift card or whatever carrot Walmart is holding out. My suspicion is that no one ever wins these types of contests. I find it annoying that I am pressured out giving a positive rating and made to feel like an asshole if I don't. To a large extent, I do feel that way, because I know the lady is working a low skill, low pay job for a company that cares little for her.

So, yeah, I give the Five Star Rating, but it’s more of a pity Five Star Rating. I'll be glad when this competition amongst the Walmart stores is over so we can just go back to ignoring each other. I’d give that a positive review.