I’m hoping someone has a definitive answer for what causes the phenomenon, but educated guesses are cool too.
Lately I’ve been trying more generic products to try saving some money, and despite my dislike for the company, Walmart generally has the cheapest prices around me for groceries. But trying to read product reviews to get an idea of what to expect it seems like the vast majority of comments don’t talk about the product’s qualities at all but just Walmart related service problems.
“This item was missing from my order!”
“It’s expired, I want a refund!”
“The can was dented.”
“Delivery driver put the chips under the milk!”
etc.
My question is: are these just confused users that are intentionally leaving these pointless messages on specific products they order instead of contacting support, or (my current suspicion) that Walmart is somehow presenting them with some kind of post-purchase rating request that is easily confused as something intended for customer service?
And regardless of the cause of it, why doesn’t Walmart do anything to filter them out? They don’t help prospective shoppers decide on an item, and usually only serve to make the employees/company look bad.
I don’t place orders on their site so I don’t know what the typical web order flow looks like to the end user so I’m hoping someone has an idea what’s causing it.
It’s kind of both things. Sites like Walmart encourage users to leave reviews, but that leaves the door open for unhappy customers to complain.
Same thing is rampant on Amazon.
I always wonder whether the people bother to actually contact the companies to try to get things fixed, or if they just post out of anger and expect someone to respond to them.
They aren’t filtered because companies like Walmart don’t actually read the reviews.
The Amazon situation was the first I’d heard about this problem so I assumed it was the same reason it happens on WM (and elsewhere). And while I certainly don’t expect Walmart to actually read reviews, I would think they would be concerned about potentially losing sales due to projecting a bad image and try to at least (poorly/cheaply) implement a system to address it.
Assuming it’s not like an email based feedback system but something with an asynchronous connection, it can’t be too hard to look for a handful of keywords (dent, missing, broken, spilled, delivery …) then throw up a Clippy-style message - “It looks like you’re talking about a problem with your order, would you like customer service to assist?” and then route the message/user in that direction.
I know I’m expecting a lot from our primitive technology in 2025 but I refuse to stop dreaming, dammit!
This is the same for virtually everything. I see it all the time in the App Store where everyone complains about some problem with the company (or developer) rather than the actual app and it’s infuriating.