I was surprised to discover today, weeks after posting my negative review of the gross Five Guys burger shop in Midtown Miami, people with generically anonymous names chiming in to aggressively defend the restaurant. These are comments that couldn't possibly be true if they had actually visited the Five Guys in question:
The staff was the opposite of rude they took a lot of time to talk me through the menu and although I did not take a survey on their educational backgrounds each person I spoke to was engaging and articulate.
This bothered me. My super nerd "this smells fishy" sense was tingling sexily. This post has been up for a while - surely everyone who is actually from Miami has already read it. Why would someone jump in now, especially to defend it while calling me an "absolute idiot"?
I did a bit more research. Both of the two comments were posted from the same IP address, but with different names. That, of course, is a huge red flag that the person commenting is full of it. Then I discovered that the IP is actually owned by AT&T and used by their WorldNet operations in Washington DC. Why would someone in Washington DC be so irate about a review of a restaurant in Miami?
I dug moar. And moar and moar. Lo and behold, the FiveGuys.com domain is registered in a suburb of DC, and they have a ton of positive magazine reviews from DC-area rags. I can't view their contact information, because that page of their site is down. I guess they prefer to read reviews on blogs rather than get feedback from their real customers.. that helps explain the poor customer experience.
Could it be that Five Guys employees have to stoop so low as to astroturf comments on our little slice of the Internet? Draw your own conclusions based on the evidence I've presented. If it is true, you'd think they'd actually visit the store and maybe cause some improvements, rather than sitting at their desks and typing on their (surely grease-stained) keyboards. But I guess if they were that smart, the restaurant wouldn't be so terrible in the first place..
Update: The commenter in question has posted this reply about why I'm wrong, dead wrong.. see more after the jump!
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