It has the full emails back and forth between yelp and company, which are the most telling part.
Basically the company doesn't want to be on yelp, but yelp won't remove them. Now they are "buying" bad reviews, so yelp has threatened to take action and the restaurant basically says "bring it on" since that is exactly what they want.
It's interesting that Yelp refer to their terms of service in their letter to the restaurant. Since this is all being done behind the restaurant's back, and they will not have signed up to any terms of service, that is completely irrelevant. Yelp has no legal contract with the restaurant.
Yelp is pointing out to the restaurant that they're asking customers to violate the customers' TOS with Yelp. Nowhere is it insinuated that they themselves have an agreement with yelp.
It is not being done behind the restaurant's back. The restaurant is paying the customers (in free pizza) to leave the feedback.
Not quite, actually. The elements of tortious interference vary by state but are roughly:
1) The existence of a contractual relationship or beneficial business relationship between two parties.
2) Knowledge of that relationship by a third party.
3) Intent of the third party to induce a party to the relationship to breach the relationship.
4) Lack of any privilege on the part of the third party to induce such a breach.
5) The contractual relationship is breached.
6) Damage to the party against whom the breach occurs.
Yelp may have a case for tortious interference against the restaurant if they are paying customers to break their Yelp terms. Yelp still sucks.
Your missing a major caveat. Completion is still encouraged so for example poaching employees is still generally legal. As long as you don't use "improper means or methods".
> They simply grew tired of the constant advertising inquiries from Yelp and what he dubs “blackmailing” and review manipulation. Sidenote: A judge recently ruled that Yelp has the power to manipulate reviews.
Hold on.
So let's say I run a highly-ranked software review website. I then proceed to "manipulate reviews" to force software developers advertise with me in exchange for not floating negative reviews to the top and not "filtering out" good ones.
Do I get Yelp's business model right? Ethics aside, how is this NOT the by-the-book racketeering?
BBB is well known for pay to play rules, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Critici.... They attempt to keep the image of the organization pristine by tamping down on the pay to play when it's aired out in public, but the fact that it's a ongoing problem at multiple offices for many years before anything is done shows just how much they care.
It's only speculation about Angie's List, which is why I said "probably." If you look at their business model, they get money from all sides -- consumers and businesses -- which leads to inherit conflicts of interest.
No, you don't get it right. Apart from trying to filter spam, Yelp doesn't "manipulate" reviews. The judge was saying that Yelp has the right to filter out reviews that it believes to be fake or spammy.
> Apart from trying to filter spam, Yelp doesn't "manipulate" reviews.
Many restaurants have claimed that yelp has offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for money. Some also suspect Yelp of writing those negative reviews.
You made a factual claim with out any supporting facts. I pointed out that your claim was not established fact. I am aware that "I'm only asking questions" can be used to cast unwarranted doubts, but in this case the accusers are reputable and numerous enough that I think we should not pretend they don't exist. For example:
Also consider the ordering of the reviews - yelp can show them in whatever order they like, so you can be a "3.5" restaurant with a full first page of 1 and 2 star reviews, regardless of whether those reviews are newer or older or have been voted up or not.
The reviews on yelp have never been ordered by voting. They're not even ordered by time -- the order changes based on a variety of factors, such as your login status, who your friends are, etc.
That's why nobody takes these claims seriously. They don't hold up to even casual scrutiny, if you know anything about the site.
Their weaponizing the Streisand Effect. I really hate the term but its truly disruption at its finest. A system is broken, and their abusing the status quo to drum up free publicity and advertisement
The emails don't show that. Yelp sent a boilerplate letter that they presumably send to everyone caught incentivizing customers to leave specific feedback on Yelp, and they replied with an immature parody. Where do you see (in the two emails in that news article) that they asked to be removed from the site?
Just a note about the "Richmond Standard": it exists for the sole purpose of publishing press releases from Chevron, as well as op-eds by Chevron-supported public figures, as a propaganda tool in the ongoing fight for political control of Richmond, California. They trick people into reading the Chevron PR as "news" by hiding it among stories like this one and hoping people don't read the fine print.
I agree with you however, it should be noticed there's a large box on the page where Chevron notes its role (emphasis mine).
"This news website is brought to you by Chevron Richmond. We aim to provide Richmond residents with important information about what's going on in the community, and to provide a voice for Chevron Richmond on civic issues"
I was reading this, thinking, "I sometimes get down to Richmond, I should check this place out. Wait, Chevron? There's no Chevron activity in Richmond, Virginia. Where the hell is this?" And then had to infer it was California based on other publications the editor works on.
This has been going on for what, 100+ years? Is there any newspaper that is not owned by some rich company or individual with their own motivations? I'm still waiting to see how far Bezos plans to go with the Post.
The main issue here is the idiotic customers writing asinine comments and reviews. I can't count the number of times I've seen things like :
"I ordered that pair of running shoes, I really wanted a toaster, one star" or "The packaging was broken when I received my game, 0.5/10".
When you accumulate "reviews" like these where people are totally unable to dissociate their internal state of mind and the quality of the product at hand (and basically using the system to vent their personal frustration), the value you get out of it is basically non-existent.
I tend to prefer the logistic modeling and I wish more sites would use that instead. Giving users the power to rank things from 1-5 or 1-10 is arbitrary and mostly worthless.
As an example, Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews. You get a wide variety of feedback but ultimately it's a Yes or No. The result is a percentage of Yes votes and I find their movie choices to be very reliable in terms of a "quality movie".
I think this sort of model could definitely work for restaurants.. or even on Amazon for a bigger platform example. The bottom line is it forces reviewers to decide...despite whatever asinine thing they can complain about, is it a yes or no?
This isn't a problem just on yelp, I've found useless reviews on other sites like Amazon too. Customer buys wrong product (even though the product description is crystal clear) and writes bad/stupid reviews (instead of simply returning the product). Another really annoying type review is "product was amazing, but it came 15 days late - I know it is not a problem of the company, but I'm still giving one star review". If they knew it was a problem from USPS (or whatever shipping company) why leave a bad rating for the product/company?
Also, in all these review sites - how do we know if the reviewer actually used the product/service? Amazon seems to differentiate, but what about others?
It would be awesome to have a review site where
1. All reviews older than 6 months (or 1 year or whatever timeframe makes sense) are not shown by default
2. Only confirmed users of the product/service are able to review
At least on Amazon you can see the misleading reviews quite easily - just click to view the one stars and see if they are relevant or not. Personally I find Amazon reviews about the best in terms of actually deciding what stuff to buy.
This doesn't mirror my own experience. Typically the 5-star reviews often fall into the category "worked great for me" or fanboyism, but it's generally ambiguous how extensive of a test they've performed on the item, if it even warrants it (though some reviews are exhaustive on this front). And 1-star reviews often are hyper-critical to excess, though any potential issues are often highlighted there, prompting me to read them first. Since all reviews end up with these extremes and the "is this review helpful" ironically isn't often helpful (more like, "do I agree with the review"), I always end up just going with my initial gut feeling on whatever I'm looking to buy anyways.
Yes, that's part of the solution. But it has to be much more robust than "This review was useful". The meta-moderation needs to be recusive, e.g. like PageRank.
The other part of the solution is a review system designed around the fact that people have different tastes. Netflix at least tries to do that. On Yelp, a great hole-in-the-wall will average three stars because those that don't like them will vote the opposite of those that love them. Three stars doesn't help either type of person.
I don't know how it works for Amazon, but my guess is that only for the products that get a lot of traffic (e.g. kindle) you have enough "honest" opinions to get rid of the bias.
Smaller restaurants don't always have enough reviews to average away the bad ones, especially when people conscript their friends (like getting everybody in your Google+ circle to leave a one star review for a restaurant that didn't let your wear your Glass).
The place has to have enough reviews for the bad ones to be rendered insignificant. If a restaurant has only 10 reviews and three of them are one-star "they only had one gluten free option" or type of reviews, the rating will be skewed over bullshit reviews.
That is true, but it definitely seems broken that that could be the case.
Personally, I always either read all the reviews or disregard them completely when the review count is <10 or 20 on every "start driven" website, precisely because of this. May be these sites shouldn't even be showing the avg when there aren't enough reviews to be meaningful?
LINKS. IT'S 2014. DEAR ALL THAT'S HOLY IN JOURNALISM, WHERE ARE THE DAMNED LINKS?
Pardon the all caps. Shame on you, Richmond Standard. This is just absurd for 2014.
pesenti has the link to the yelp page, which I won't replicate, but here's the Botto Bistro FAQ page, which they went to the effort to take a screen shot of and cut into pieces and upload into their content system (which had to be at least five minutes total) but couldn't be bothered to link to (at about five seconds): http://www.bottobistro.com/FAQ.html
Some of these Yelp reviews are priceless! I like the self-referential ones (or is it self-anticipatory?) where people write predictive reviews based on their expected dislike of the restaurant in advance of actually visiting it. Also priceless is the one referenced in the article where the restaurant manager steals away the reviewer's girlfriend, so he goes and sulks there once a week in a dark corner booth.
Yelp's fundamental flaw is the fact that you can't tell real from fabricated reviews. You have to read with a skeptical eye and any overly gushing praise or overly nasty criticism of a particular business is suspect. I tend to trust the three and four star reviews over the 1's, 2's, and 5's.
Amazon at least has the advantage of identifying people who actually bought the product, and there is the option to comment on a review. It's not perfect but can be useful. Yelp's reviewers seem a bit under-vetted by comparison.
They are what they are. I think the mistake is imagining people care about the Yelp rating. Do folks look at the number, or read the reviews? Most of us can spot a rankled-reviewer-rant and ignore it. Sensitive restaurant owners are getting upset over very little.
I was in Boston a few weeks ago visiting a famous bar by Fenway called the "Cask n Flagon." This place is a gigantic sports bar and one of probably only five or six bars that sits around the stadium.
I got to talking with the bartender and he told me a story about a customer who became irate that the bar was closing early and that they were scared that she would go on Yelp and write a bad review. I laughed because I thought he was joking, thinking that nobody would ever base the decision to visit this place on a Yelp review. However he told me that the reviews matter a lot. I still doubt that he is correct about that, but it does show you the perception and fear restaurants large and small have about Yelp.
I don't know about Yelp, but I've met people working in hotels who live in genuine fear of bad Trip Advisor reviews.
And I can understand that - if I'm going somewhere I don't know and have little time for research you just go somewhere like Trip Advisor and skim read. A couple of very negative reviews might make a real difference for smaller places which only have a couple of dozen reviews in total.
... But sometimes a bad review works in the company's favour. Someone can have a bad experience and not be happy with efforts the business takes to sort things out. I might think the company did everything reasonably possible and so that "bad" review become evidence good practice.
The degree to which hotels seem to rely on tripadvisor reviews for feedback is pretty crazy. Every hotel manager i've worked with has been completely glued to tripadvisor, and the most important factor in every decision they make seems to be how it affects tripadvisor reviews.
People generally use the numbers to help build a shortlist of contenders and then read the reviews of the dozen or so restaurants on that shortlist. If your base score is too low to even get on peoples shortlist then it doesn't matter what people have written
Underdog story, or arrogant owners who don't want to listen to feedback? The Yelp review process is certainly flawed, but I find their FAQ troubling.
"Q. Have you heard that the customer is always right?
A. Yes and we find it hilarious. A business owner who believes that deserves to deal with the monsters he has created. We don't belong to that club, but if you do...bravo!"
Update: A couple people have asked for my clarification on why this is "troubling." I worked in the service industry before. I also have travelled extensively outside the U.S. in other Western countries. I have found that what differentiates the American service industry from other countries is that we do have this ingrained notion that "The Customer is Always Right." If I'm handing over my hard earned money to a business, I do expect the business to bend over backward for me. If it doesn't there are plenty of other business that are willing to. That's one of the great things about a free market - we can choose where to shop in a non-monopoly market based on how well a business treats us. Businesses that don't get that deserve to lose customers (and do). In short: You're not the only suitor for my business and I don't need to feel bad about having high expectations.
Troubling why? Some people are dicks. I find the widespread service industry attitude that you must bend over backwards to treat them well while they're treating you like dirt quite troubling.
I can't speak for this place because I've never been there. However, I definitely wouldn't hold it against a restaurant that chose to treat customers with the same level of respect that the customers gave their serving staff.
If the restaurant is thriving in spite of its bad yelp reviews that suggests that it has a loyal customer base. That would suggest that they are doing something right.
"I find the widespread service industry attitude that you must bend over backwards to treat them well while they're treating you like dirt quite troubling."
Exactly. For an eye-opening view of what kind of shitty customer behavior restaurant and retail employees have to put up with on a daily basis, see the "Not Always Right" blog:
It works for that particular restaurant because they have a local clientele and don't cater to the tourist or traveler trade. That is, like many restaurants and other small businesses they are not really dependent on the internet for traffic.
Who visits Richmond, CA except for people who know someone there? It's not Las Vegas or Orlando.
The customer desiring a person who bends over backwards is obligated to find a seller willing to bend over backwards and negotiate with that person. Demanding that a seller whose business does not include bending over backwards bend over backwards is exactly why the customer is not always right.
To put it another way, a business is equally justified in having high expectations of its customers. A successful business often requires suggesting people pursue other options. An Apple Store Genius won't replace a screen on a ten year old feature phone.
> If I'm handing over my hard earned money to a business, I do expect the business to bend over backward for me.
I find this attitude troubling and fundamentally incompatible with the entire idea of market exchange. In an mutually-agreed exchange, there is no reason a party who is giving money is inherently more entitled to special treatment from the other party beyond the express terms of the exchange. If I am giving my "hard-earned money" in to someone in exchange for the fruits of their labor (whether that's a service or a good, and whether its the direct fruit of their personal labor or that of labor that they have purchased with their "hard-earned money"), I am no more entitled to have them bend over backward for me than the reverse.
Now, admittedly, if the service I am purchasing from them is a servant-like attitude, then, sure, I am entitled to that -- that's what I am buying. But if I want some other good or service, plus a servant-like attitude, I should expect to pay extra for the extra I'm getting. And since I value my hard-earned money -- it being hard-earned and all -- I am unlikely to wish to pay the premium that makes that worthwhile except when it does something particular to enhance the value of the base good or service that it accompanies.
My mum works in a shop devoted to the marine industry.
There the mantra is, the customer is almost certainly wrong and probably needs saving from themselves before they buy something that will kill them.
They spend a lot of time telling people not to buy something and telling them to buy something else. Customers are not useful when dead, no matter how happy they were when they left.
> Customers are not useful when dead, no matter how happy they were when they left.
One of my hobbies is motorcycle racing/track days and I'm always flabbergasted about how lax organizers are about safety. I'm going to share this quote with them next time I head out.
As an addendum, I just thought that the service industries where the customer is always right are also the first ones where you won't notice very much when the employees get swapped with robots.
This is probably why supermarkets were some of the first to cross over.
Yeah, exactly. I haven't always gotten excellent service, but I usually get at least very good service because I try to be polite to the retail staff/waiters.
The idea that you are entitled to people being completely servile towards you because you have money is incredibly repulsive to me.
> If I'm handing over my hard earned money to a business, I do expect the business to bend over backward for me.
You're a crazy person. If I go to an argentinian beef restaurant I don't expect them to bend of backwards when I demand a salt cod dish, or to give Crazy McNotastebuds a free meal because they "had" to add salt to the dish.
> You're not the only suitor for my business and I don't need to feel bad about having high expectations.
That cuts both ways, they're obviously enjoying sufficient clientele for their limited room space and serving time, you're not the only suitor for their business and they don't need to feel bad about asshole clients.
And a 5mn discussion with the average retail slave (or support, or basically anything client-facing) is sufficient to find out that asshole and crazy clients do exist in droves, and enabling them is a stupid idea.
>You're a crazy person. If I go to an argentinian beef restaurant I don't expect them to bend of backwards when I demand a salt cod dish, or to give Crazy McNotastebuds a free meal because they "had" to add salt to the dish.
If you want to read what I wrote in an extreme manner, of course you can reply to it in an extreme manner. Language is ambiguous like that. I obviously didn't mean an Australian beef restaurant should serve Cod. I meant that businesses should (and most do) whatever is reasonable to do to please customers.
PS Name calling like "crazy person" never helps an argument.
> If you want to read what I wrote in an extreme manner
I'm just reading what you wrote, nothing more and nothing less. It's not my fault if what you wrote is extreme. You're the one who agrees with "The Customer is Always Right" (note: the word here is "always", not "some times when I think they're reasonably right") and wrote "I do expect the business to bend over backward for me". Without any caveat anywhere.
> PS Name calling like "crazy person" never helps an argument.
If it's a spade, what's wrong with calling it a spade?
"The Customer is Always Right" is an expression. It's not a literal statement, as is "bend over backward." For people who weren't aware of what an expression is, I wrote another reply with my clarifications. Thanks, have a great week!
This post spurred a lot of great discussion but a lot of it hinges on a nearly literal reading of "bend over backwards." What did I mean by that? I meant that I expect
* The business to do anything reasonable in its power to make me happy. Different people have different definitions of reasonable. But most reasonable people can agree that "reasonable" does not include giving me unadvertised discounts/spending unreasonable amounts of time with me/or offering me services not usually rendered.
* Service with a smile. I'm choosing you over your competitors - be nice about it.
* Don't resent the customer. My taste might not be as good as yours. I also don't work in your industry.
well it's true. Assholish customers are not customers you want to keep, unless you have no choice. Especially at a restaurant. They are the kind of customer that is likely to have a anger tantrum, and cause nice customers to leave.
I charged people with your opinions higher mark-up (effectively) by declining to give them discounts because I didn't like their entitled attitude. Sometimes I also threw them out because I just couldn't be bothered.
In general, they actually paid less (even not getting discounts) and took up more employee time than other customers, and we were better off without people like that.
I think the only people who actually tolerate them are large chain stores, and only because they can't be bothered trying to assess whether their drones are exercising good judgment.
I honestly don't bother with online restaurant reviews anymore. No matter how good of a place it is, you can always have an off night or a challenging customer. These generate negative reviews in an indistinguishable manner from any other restaurant. The only positive reviews I see look suspiciously like what employees would write so those aren't helpful either. 1-5 star ratings are meaningless.
But movie reviews (a la Rotten Tomatoes) work somehow. Possibly because they aren't just flaming rants about how there was a hair in their popcorn. Maybe if the reviewing community were asked "what restaurants do you frequent and why?" and you could follow active citizen reviewers in your area it might generate more constructive feedback.
I always find this flaw in yelp which I think might become a bigger problem for them. They allow pretty much anybody to write any kind of review for any business. There is no validation that the yelp user have had interacted with the business unless the business owners takes a notice and claims that its otherwise.
I was at a a small business hackathon and not even a single SMB owner was happy with yelp. Even the ones who had good reviews do not think that it contributed a lot to their business. Has this thing ever crossed your mind?
Not sure why but Yelp always seems inaccurate to me. I also tried to write a review once but it flagged it for some reason and it never appeared. It was a 3 star review too, neither exceptionally positive or negative.
I use TripAdvisor to find local places to eat. Usually the top 1 or 2 places are good for a given type of food. Anything under that is a mixed bag.
On the other hand, I dealt with a company that was really deceptive and then looked at the online reviews (not on Yelp). They were all glowing. But when I looked more closely they all followed the same template and seemed to be posted at 9:xx am every morning - like its somebody's job.
I wonder what Yelp's recourse is for buying reviews? If it's de-listing, well, that's exactly what the restaurant wants.
It would be interesting to see whether Yelp decides to exercise the power to change someone's one-star review into a four-star review based on its content.
What's silly about this whole thing is that the solution for Yelp is so obvious: Just acknowledge what everyone knows already -- that the current system for managing and aggregating ratings has been a total flop -- i.e. that 99.99% of their users use Yelp for address search, NOT recommendations -- and let business opt out of having their ratings listed (at no charge, of course) -- until they come up with something that actually does work.
Wouldn't it be a better business model to charge businesses to opt-out? Doing this would provide them with more runway to come up with a sustainable business model to leverage and monetize their crowdsourced reviews in a creative manner. Seems like it would be more in line with their values, too.
Wouldn't it be a better business model to charge businesses to opt-out?
Most people would consider that blackmail. But the folks over at Yelp would probably like that kind of thinking. Ever consider applying for a job with their marketing team?
what's amazing to me is people still read the reviews on yelp. they're completely worthless. it's a bunch of kids and wannabe snobs preening for each other. i went through that phase - that's how i can recognize it.
now i just use it to search and get directions. its interface is still superior for a quick lookup on my phone when i'm headed somewhere.
as soon as they require a login to use the mobile app, i'll probably stop using it.
You remember that girl in high school who was always talking about how Becky was totally giving her this look earlier, seriously you guys she's such a bitch?
Yeah, she's 25 now and likes to write angry Yelp reviews whenever her water glass level falls below 50%.
I understand it does suck to have one or two idiot customers that will flip out about something stupid and write a terrible review of your great restaurant. But I think it would be better just to have no reviews at all on Yelp. Is there anyway to ask yelp to remove your business. Can you not tell yelp that the phone number and address they have listed are personal and no longer a business and that yelp should remove them?
They tried to get removed from Yelp and Yelp ignored them. That's what they really want, to be removed. See my comment elsewhere with a link for more details.
I've used yelp reviews with great success when traveling. The signal noise ratio in urban areas is good enough to weed out the occasional bad review. I look out for the really low rated ones and avoid. People aren't stupid, and read online reviews with a certain amount of skepticism.
If they can survive with regulars thats fine for them.
I would avoid any place thats fighting any kind of reviews.
I like the part at the end of the article where they ask is this Italian restaurant any good anyhow(their reviews on Yelp being unhelpful at this point, worthless).
I couldn't help but think if only there was a place on the web to find out whether a business is worth the money or not.
Is the restaurant claiming all review systems are broken? Do the owners ever read reviews on Amazon or the general web? I don't think you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
No, in the article it clearly states that the owners are getting "blackmailed" by Yelp and have decided to retaliate, but otherwise think it (I assume a rating website) is actually a good idea.
Edit: my apologies for any snark above, I just realized that the article I was referencing was the one posted by jedberg.
The restaurant might not be, but I will claim something close to that: all aggregated-score-oriented (e.g., number/star) review systems that aren't centrally based on some reasonable measure of the the individual user's trust/affinity with each individual reviewer presented are fundamentally broken, just because reviews are subjective and without accounting for taste similarity, other people's subjective ratings are useless (individual text reviews have a similar problem, but at least well written ones will report information from which one might infer the basis of the opinion and get some utility from a review by someone with different tastes.)
That's a pretty good (and unorthodox) way to promote yourself and get some free press. Never really trusted Yelp anyway, too many stupid people pretending they're experts.
It is untrustworthy when a restaurant has only 4 or 5 reviews, even if they're written by "Yelp Pros". But when hundreds of people have "Checked In" at a place, you can usually rely on the star count to give you a fairly accurate estimation of how good it's going to be.
I've also noticed some cities are way more into it than others, making it more reliable. Everyone in Halifax, NS depends on it, but when I visit my home Little Rock, AR, it's worthless, even though Little Rock is technically a larger city.
wait a minute, you can't force Yelp to remove your restaurant?! and I thought we had retarded Internet laws in my country... here in Colombia, no business can have your information without your consent. If they do, you can force them to remove any records they have on you –it's a principle called Habeas Data.
This won't work on people like me who may look at the star rating but have no desire to read user reviews. You'll just be a one-star place and I'll dismiss you out of hand..
You're missing the point. With all one star reviews in a crowded field like restaurants most folks will never see your reviews on Yelp. They don't care if you don't find them they're doing just fine without Yelp's "help".
but with all the publicity surrounding their actions, will they become more well known which will in fact counteract their star rating on Yelp? My guess is yes.
Your loss then, no? If you dismiss them out of hand, you're losing out on the chance to visit them and eat there (and enjoy a good meal). Clearly a lot of people like them, and they're not suffering for business because of dismissals like yours, and, in fact, they're saying they want to avoid getting people who like Yelp and trust Yelp reviews, so the only one who seems to lose in this scenario is you...?
So I should try all the one star places in case they're actually pretty good? Seems to me I'd be better off sticking to highly recommended places, if the false positive rate is small enough. The false negative rate is obviously not great but it's far less of a concern.
A large population of diners in this country do this when trying to find new eating establishments:
1. Searches google for a restaurant name
2. Checks the number of stars Yelp gives it in the Google result
or
1. Searches "dinner" on yelp
2. Clicks on the highest rated Yelp pages
For a popular restaurant with a fan following the Botto pizza strategy might work. Generally speaking, ignoring your customer's needs and wants is a fast path to complacency. And hopefully you're all aware that:
COMPLACENCY WILL BE THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR DOWNFALL.
Internalize that statement. While Botto's is cool today, adaptation is the key to long term success.
Inevitably after serving each of their loyal customers many times over, the customers will have a bad meal here or there. With an attitude of "The customer is not always right", disagreements will leave customers disenchanted one by one, and slowly these loyal customers will become less loyal. Or another good Italian pizza place will open up. Or the italian food wants of the neighborhood will change. Or Yelp's powerhold on connecting diners to restaurants will grow stronger.
It has the full emails back and forth between yelp and company, which are the most telling part.
Basically the company doesn't want to be on yelp, but yelp won't remove them. Now they are "buying" bad reviews, so yelp has threatened to take action and the restaurant basically says "bring it on" since that is exactly what they want.