Product Reviews

What do you do when you’re thinking about buying a new car or appliance or some new gadget? Do you jump in the car and spend hours or days going around to various stores and asking salesmen their “honest” opinion about their products? I can’t remember when I stopped doing that – probably shortly after I was able to get on the internet.

Truth is, a big percentage of people now go online to do their product research. We visit several online retailers like Amazon or Buy.com and see what all the competing products are and read the reviews. The reviews are particularly interesting, especially when they are negative or marginal.

But have you ever wondered who writes these reviews? I get this weekly e-mail from a place called DealUnion that lists all the specials and discounts offered by various online retailers and I noticed a line for a Bissell spotcarpet cleaner, which I have thinking about getting (we have cats and dogs!). So I clicked on it and it took me to Amazon and I read the manufacturer’s info and automatically scrolled down to read the reviews.

Now I’ve seen this thing advertised on TV and I’ve got to say, it doesn’t look like a very good idea to me. It’s a stationary cleaning machine that you just plunk down on the stain and turn it on. Assuming that it works, what you get is a nice clean circle about 6-7” in diameter in your carpet. Now this is fine if the rest of your carpet looks like the day you had it installed – probably not the case huh?

The point here is that all the reviews focused on how well the thing worked, all glowing reviews in this case. But no one suggested that you’d probably be better off buying an upright carpet cleaning machine for a little more money so you can clean a wider area, even a whole room. If you have pets and you need a spot cleaner machine, you’re going to end up with this polka dot carpet in no time, kind of like a big version of Twister built right into your carpet. So you’re going to have to rent or buy a big machine anyway!

So I started thinking about who writes these reviews, wondering if it could possibly be people working for Bissell? Surely these companies don’t recruit employees to scour the internet (from home of course so the company domain doesn’t show up) and submit glowing reviews about their products to improve the product score! My gosh, that would be dishonest and manipulative and, and, totally plausible. Damn.

After I started thinking about that, I got kind of bummed. Here I’ve been thinking that the internet was a place I could go for honest opinions from real people. You know, people who had tried a product and could tell me what it was really like – not the regular marketing hype I get from store salesmen. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a skeptic. There is something to be said for the “ignorance is bliss” state of mind.