Pet Peeve # 1,704 - "free/discounted" product for my honest & unbiased review

[Darrell KSR]

I research things to death, even minor things. I like user reviews--you can pick through them, and the "star" number sometimes isn't key, but what they say is.

Except more and more I'm seeing all these garbage reviews on places like Amazon. They do disclose, somewhere at the end, that they have received the product for free, or for a discounted price, "in exchange for my honest and unbiased review."

Really? That's supposed to convince me, throwing that sentence in there? I have seen some less-than-glowing reviews in that situation, but not many. Definitely disproportionately positive. Most of the people may be honest; I dunno--but there's enough doubt cast that I have to disregard all of them and they're worthless to me.

[Darrell KSR]

Here's a quick example. I'm looking for a portable CD player for my daughter, nothing fancy. Just a backup in case places she goes to sing don't have their own CD player or it fails.

So I found this Jensen CD-490 player (this one happens to be blue and black, claims a limited edition). Price $44. Has 14 reviews; at least the first several reviews are all "tainted" ones (if not all 14 of them), and they happen to be 14/14 5.0 star reviews.

But if you keep looking, you'll see the Jensen CD-490 (red and black one), price $30. Appears to be the same device, just different color. Has 725 reviews--not 14--and a more average 3.7/5.0 star review. Reading the reviews, and I'm surprised it's that high--a lot of failures on it pretty early. There must be a lot of 5* reviews in there somewhere to skew the ratings.

[Doc]

Maybe not on the same topic but is if this is concerning negative reviews....

I love reading hotel reviews when folks give low stars. I especially love when they give low stars because the people next door were loud. Now you give a hotel a low review because you had loud people in the room next door?? How does that warrant a low hotel review?

Or you pay $49.00 a night and folks review you low because there was no shuttle service and the "free breakfast" was just doughnuts, muffins, juice and coffee. What did you expect, a catered made to order omelette with bacon, toast and fresh squeezed OJ from the thighs of a virgin? You're staying at a $49.00 a night hotel.

A few weeks ago we got a 1 star yelp review. We did some research to find out who left it and come to find out it was the nephew of the client. Seems the 2 pets left were freaking out during a storm while boarding so we called the owner to authorized some meds to help. The owner OKed it but the nephew felt we "took advantage of the situation" and were ripping them off. Her costs were what the estimate she was given when she dropped off plus the cost of the valium. Of course this reviewer is one of those people who use yelp to complain about everything as we looked at his other reviews. He had about 50% of reviews that were negative. Stuff like couldn't eat the buffalo wings even after washing the sauce off (who washes wing sauce off??), and "worse burger I ever ate"..total hose bag. So anyway we sent a letter to the aunt to tell her that her nephew was a loser (not in those words) with all his reviews including ours. Hope she beats his 20 year old punk ass.