First, I am very proud of Fenster’s 4.8 rating based on nearly 1,600 Google Maps reviews. It is extremely hard to earn a score like that when you only serve coffee to go. We put in enormous effort to reach it. And yet I insist: a high Google Maps rating does not always mean you will be satisfied. Here is why.
The very highest ratings usually appear where service is cheap, fast, and high quality all at once. As we already know, that combination does not exist. It is like the laws of physics. Out of those three, you always have to remove one. Then the system works.
In other words, you cannot please every potential audience. If you try, you become unprofitable and eventually disappear. Out of curiosity I looked up Michelin restaurants on Google Maps. To my surprise, many do not even reach four stars. The most common complaint is “expensive.” It is odd, but people who go to a Michelin restaurant sometimes expect dinner to cost ten euros instead of three hundred. And that is it: “expensive.” There is not much to say. The point is obvious.
A Google Maps rating is, as we say, the “average temperature in the hospital.” One patient has a fever over 40°C, another is room temperature, and the average is 36.6°C. Looks fine, but nobody is healthy.
A Google Maps rating is the sum of subjective impressions from visitors who expect one thing and receive another. It is the gap between expectation and reality. Otherwise, how do you explain a group of visitors who give us one star solely because we do not accept cash? That is like giving one star to a subway ticket machine for the same reason, or one star to the sea with the comment, “because it is wet.” For years we have clearly stated everywhere that we do not accept cash. It is strange to arrive and be surprised by that. What is more, these people do not even taste the coffee. They simply cannot pay with cash, and then they leave a review. Is that objective?
The same goes for seating. Fenster is a window. Everywhere it is declared as “to go.” Yet there are people who leave one star with the words, “no seating.” Again, they never tried the coffee. The same with “no food,” and similar points.
Such ratings do not reflect reality. If someone writes, “did not like the coffee,” or “service was off,” I am grateful. I take those seriously and hold very strict team meetings to understand what happened and how to prevent it. Those reviews help us improve. We are thankful for them. But what do reviews about payment methods or lack of seating actually solve? They are destructive and say nothing about quality, so they cannot serve as objective measurements.
My favorite topic is price. From time to time we live through entire wave-attacks on this point. “Expensive.” That is like saying “correct.” There is no absolute adjective that fits everything. Every item costs exactly what people are willing to pay for it. If it truly becomes “too expensive,” customers disappear, and a business will either close, change its price, or increase the product’s value. What other options are there? It cannot be that, at the exact moment one person stands outside Fenster writing “expensive” and leaving one star, ten other customers are happily buying the same product. That is nonsense. This logic applies everywhere. If I cannot afford something, that is not the business’s problem. I can either pass on the item or find a way to pay for it.
This argument is especially misplaced with Fenster, because our prices overall are slightly lower than at other places. Which makes the “too expensive” claim even stranger. Yet it appears most often.
There is also a small, persistent group that complains about the graffiti on our walls and leaves one star with, “why do they not repaint.” There is a simple answer: we are not allowed to paint the exterior of our building. Beyond that, wall paint does not reflect the quality of the coffee, the service, or even the prices.
In truth, fewer than ten percent of negative reviews actually concern the quality of coffee or service. The remainder do not relate to Fenster’s product at all, and they do not describe the guest experience. They are highly nonobjective. I will not name names, but we have even seen negative reviews that clearly come from nearby competitors, some of the most famous in the world.
So… that is our experience, based on 1,600 reviews. If one day we have twenty or thirty thousand reviews, I fear our rating will drop a bit—precisely for the reasons above. That is why, when I see a great place with a Google Maps rating lower than it deserves, I am not surprised. On the contrary, I have often visited highly rated spots where product and service did not match the number, but the interior was pretty and they accepted cash. That is deeply unfair.
One last story. A maker of alternative milk promoted their product to us for a long time. We even tried it for a while. The company asked if they could place us on their map as a location where you can taste their product. I said I was against it. They listed us anyway. I missed the moment. Then we stopped using their product. After that, one-star reviews started appearing: “They do not have XXX milk.” There were quite a lot. I asked them for a very long time to remove us from their map. They did. But the pressure continued for quite a while.
So when you look at a Google Maps rating, read the reviews. The number alone can be very misleading. It is hard to believe that a place receives twenty or thirty fives in a row and then suddenly a single one-star bomb. That is not normal. Be attentive, analyze, and you will find the truly great places.
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