As he typed at the computer, Donny Roush could hear his mother reminding him that if he couldn’t say something nice then he ought to say nothing at all.
What he wrote on the website were his impressions of a Park Hill dry cleaner during a November visit, a mini-review for anyone who cared to know about the shop before going there themselves.
“Little things matter: Before giving my child a lollipop, the shop owners asked if that was OK,” Roush wrote about Park Hill Cleaners and Tailors on East 23rd Avenue. “That shows me they pay attention to customer service and MY preferences. And, they got my shirts darn clean and nicely pressed.”
Roush, the advancement director at The Odyssey School, a Denver charter school in the Stapleton development, is among a growing number of people offering candid — most pleasant, though some acerbic — assessments of experiences they’ve had with local businesses.
Users in the millions
The number of Internet users who peruse the reviews posted on websites such as , and — where Roush has placed his thoughts — is into the millions each month and growing.
Last month alone more than 16 million users perused reviews at , said spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose. The other sites had traffic similarly high. The explosion in popularity of online reviews posted by consumers benefits the public, its creators say.
“Consumers are always better off when they have more information, so the fact that there’s more information out there is great,” said Angie Hicks, founder of , one of the first and more successful websites.
“But it’s not a good thing if the information isn’t reliable,” she said. “It’s even more important than ever these days that consumers don’t just take every search result that comes their way as gospel.”
That has left some wondering whether the reviews are as impartial as they appear. For instance, Roush has posted 28 reviews since Oct. 23 — none worse than three-of-five stars, though most are four and five — and received $1 for each review as part of a fundraiser that benefited his school.
“It was a nice opportunity to express an opinion and make some money for us,” he said.
The idea, founder Ward Lassoe said, was to help build a foundation of reviews for the website. There are more than 13,000 reviews now. Each is policed for vindictiveness while trying to maintain candor.
“We’re not a Wild West-type of website with freestyle shooting,” said Lassoe, who launched the Colorado site in November, a year after initiating the same in South Carolina and Kentucky. Other states are planned, he said.
“We won’t censor, but we want it to be informative, unbiased and accurate,” he said. “We’ll investigate anything a business deems unfair, but if it’s legitimate, it goes back up.”
Team checks complaints
Other sites are similar in their approach. At , which began in San Francisco and outlasted a pair of competitors, first-hand accounts are encouraged and a customer-service team checks into any business complaints.
The site initiated a Denver component nearly a year ago and has seen most of its reviews for restaurants, where there were twice as many as the second-ranking category, shopping — 1,236 to 617.
Categories that Lassoe said he hopes will vault BizBuzzColorado to the top — education, home services, health and medical — rank low on Yelp’s site. Professional services such as lawyers and accountants have a scant 25 reviews on yet are already garnering bigger numbers at BizBuzz.
“Restaurants are the natural leading category when things begin,” Ichinose said. “It’s very much a lifestyle blog, as they write reviews they’re writing about those things they experience. You’ll visit more restaurants in a year than a doctor’s office.”
Likely the biggest difference between the sites is cost. AngiesList requires a membership fee to read reviews and offers an easy-to-read report card format.
Businesses are encouraged to respond directly to negative reviews, and some sites are beginning to allow member businesses to contact unhappy customers directly. AngiesList doesn’t allow businesses to pay for placement, though other sites do.
Hicks, who lives in Indianapolis, boasts more than 750,000 members on the list she created in 1995.
“There is an abundance of information out there,” she said. “Without accountability, though, there’s not much credibility.”
David Migoya: 303-954-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com
