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Groupon manager allegedly threatens bad Yelp reviews after San Francisco restaurateur declines offer [Updates!]

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FILE - In this Sept. 22, 2011 file photo, employees at Groupon Inc. pose in silhouette with the company logo in the lobby of the online coupon company's Chicago offices. Groupon will report quarterly financial results after the market closes, Monday May 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

Employees at Groupon pose in silhouette with the company logo in the lobby of the online coupon company’s Chicago offices. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Nobody likes cold calls, and even fewer people like cold calls about unwanted things. These days, with the deluge of restaurant-related websites, deal sites and listing guides, restaurateurs are getting more solicitors than ever.

The bar at Sauce. Photo: Facebook

The bar at Sauce. Photo: Facebook

Last week, Groupon Area Sales Manager Andrew Johnston called Sauce, a restaurant with two locations in San Francisco (Hayes Valley and Belden Lane), according to Sauce partner Trip Hosley, who answered the call. Citing poor past Groupon experiences and an all-around distaste for Groupon, Hosley declined the Groupon offer, prompting Johnston to fire off an email to Hosley, citing a “huge network of friends” who are Yelpers (which, good for him?).

On Friday, Sauce posted the alleged email correspondence on the restaurant’s Facebook page, starting with Johnston’s email to Sauce:

From: Andrew Johnston <ajohnston@groupon.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 5:25 PM
Subject: Thanks
To: info@sleepsf.com

Hi Trip!

I sincerely appreciate you hanging up on me. As a resident of San Francisco for over 25 years, I have a huge network of friends (ages 25-40) that all are extremely active on Yelp as well as other social media. I will gladly let them know how you treated me as well as my feelings about the people who run Sauce.

Go Giants!

Andy


Andy Johnston II GROUPON GETAWAYS
Area Sales Manager
ajohnston@groupon.com

Hosley’s email reply to Johnston was memorable:

Andy,

You must be new to cold calling, you might want to develop a thicker skin, or work for a less despised company.

Despite what you might think, you have NO right to my time. I told you that I was not interested and asked you twice to remove me from you call list, as I have EVERY time I have been called by a representative from Groupon since our last, horrific, experience with your company. I do not have to give you any more chances, you do not have the right to interrupt me, take time away from my already busy day or to force me to listen to how new and wonderful Groupon is, I am not interested. You would be saving yourself time and energy by removing me from your call list, and focusing on business with whom your company has not already burned bridges.

We had a relationship with Groupon, Groupon messed it up, we no longer want to have a relationship with Groupon, end of story. After two or three years it would seem like you could respect my wishes as a business owner not to deal with your company and leave me alone.

All the best,
Trip
Sauce.Sleep

Already, Sauce’s Yelp page has devolved into chaos, with a bunch of new five-star reviews and a few new one-star reviews knocking its cleanliness since Friday [Update: The negative reviews have been deleted]. Coincidentally, it comes at the same time that Yelp has announced it is doing more to cultivate trust from the restaurant side of reviews by cracking down on restaurants that cultivate shills; perhaps they should also be regulating the other side of the coin: renegade users who leave vindictive reviews.

Hosley has not yet responded to inquiries. [Update: See below]

On Sunday, All Things D reported that Groupon had suspended Johnston while it investigates the situation.

***

Update, 1:50 p.m.: Hosley has responded to Scoop via-email, and explains much of the background surrounding Sauce’s experience with Groupon. He also adds that he has not heard back from Johnston since the last email, but does explain that an apologetic Groupon manager has since reached out.

This is Hosley’s email:

Like many business we have tried several of the “couponing” sites, including Groupon (twice) and in our opinion Groupon has a parasitic business model that can be very harmful to the long term health of a business like ours.  After trying their service twice and having down right awful experiences with the consumers who were brought in and the restrictions on the offers, we decided we did not want to work with them again.

 

We were not satisfied that we actually gained any new repeat customers and instead we actually felt it brought in one time customers only looking for a deep discount, that were not a good fit with our (very broad) demographic.  The only “positive” effect we saw from our campaigns was that some regular customers also took advantage of the deal, but we can offer our loyal customers incentives directly, so we did not feel the cost of the Groupon deal was justified.

 

We had issue with how the offers were worded, the restrictions that Groupon [puts] on timing, dates and redemption as well as the % of revenue they keep and the high level of discounting they push businesses to offer, with little or no regard to the different costs of operation and customer acquisition for different types of businesses.  This combined with a general a lack of support during and after the promotions ran caused us to decide not to work with them again.

 

We are obviously on a list and every time a new person gets hired we get another phone call, we have several business lines so we get several calls.  Really not that big a deal, i don’t think Groupon is doing anything that any other company would not do, when they call me,  trying to drum up business from inactive past customers is a classic sales strategy.  They are supposedly experts at new customer acquisition so they should know it makes sense to maximize revenue with existing clients, and try to revive cold accounts.  I get all that and have no problem with it.

 

Andy called me on Friday afternoon just before we open[ed], as I was in the middle of hammering out some upcoming renovation details.  The phone rang and as an owner operator, I prioritize answering the phone very high on my list of things to do.  I excused myself to answer it, as every call is a potential reservation and every missed call is a potential lost sale.  Thus even though i was otherwise engaged, I took the call.  As soon as Andy identified himself as a Groupon representative, i broke into his pitch and informed him that i was not interested and that he should remove me from his list.  He attempted to restart his pitch and I said no thank you and hung up my phone so i could return to my business at hand.  I wonder if there is a recording of the call, because in the version of the conversation that runs in my head, I really wasn’t “that” rude. I understand that is a hell of a caveat but in this case I believe I was curt and possibly abrupt, but my intention was in fact to end the call and return to my own business as quickly as possible.

 

I get that it was probably the last straw for Andy on a frustrating Friday afternoon, I was in sales a long time ago and had my share of hang ups…it’s part of the life when you are cold calling.  I didn’t insult or threaten him in any way or even raise my voice, I simply took control of my own time back from an unwanted interruption.  I honestly didn’t think twice about it until I received his threatening email (which he then followed through on.)

 

I decided to post the threat because it was the best/fastest way I could think of to “fight fire with fire.”  I believe that I, and more importantly, my businesses also have a fairly strong social network and I believed that we had a better chance of ending the threat with publicity than by some anonymous complaint filing mechanism through the Groupon website after 5 pm on a Friday.

 

I think the popularity of the post took off because it is a concrete example of the type of thing that small business owners face when trying to find their path on the web.  And the potential for abuse that is somewhat inherent in Social media.  Thousands of business like ours are trying to determine what they should do, how should they advertise, how much time and effort to spend on so many different channels of advertising and promotion that didn’t even exist a couple years ago, and these new business models like Groupon are backed by billions of dollars and have the capacity to come across as bullying others to use their service.  In this case through the misuse of other web 2.0 services.

 

My brothers and Chef Ben and I have put every dollar we have ever had and more into our businesses, we employ 30+ people and are active in the local community.  We take every decision on how to invest our capital and expand our business seriously.  But we have the right to choose NOT to do business with a company that we feel does not align with our goals and our brand.

 

I got a call from a sales manager at Groupon yesterday, obviously he was beside himself that this was happening and offered to try and approach Yelp to have the fake reviews deleted.  For which I am genuinely appreciative.

 

From the responses our post has gotten, I do not believe that this is a “one time thing,”  however I also do not believe it is endemic or a system wide corporate policy.  Certainly I have been abruptly truncating sales calls from Groupon for a couple of years and this is the 1st time (to my knowledge) that we have been retaliated against using fake online reviews.

 

The issue to me is, how many others has this happened to?  And what did (or can) they do?  Did they have a way to fight back?  Because even with a business account there does not seem to be a fast way for a small business to combat this type of threat and action by a disgruntled sales rep and see immediate action taken by the larger company  (in this case either by Groupon or yelp) in time to stop the damage.  In this instance, I do not blame yelp at all, they are just a vehicle.  But it does highlight a vulnerability in the Social media system, if you will, where great damage can be inflicted very quickly causing a business owner to feel powerless and trapped.

 

What if Sauce didn’t happen to have a huge base of tech customers willing to jump to our online defense?  Honestly, I am not a great social media manager, I could not have gotten this attention without the help of our investors and customers who are very active in the Tech community, and very vocal on line.  I can hardly get my personal and business Facebook posts to go the right place, or get my tweets to stop triple posting on my pages.  Fortunately for us,  Sauce’s food and service have made us many friends who are much more adept at navigating social communication on the web than we are ourselves.  We are grateful to everyone who helped launch our issues to the top of the discussion in so many places, and we hope they will all stop by Sauce soon so we can thanks them in person. In the end if this [drives] people to come to Sauce, we will [chalk] it up as a win.

 

 

 

Update #2, 3:30pm: All Things D reports that Groupon has fired Johnston.


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