Stop Asking Me to Rate My Experience

I bought a pack of batteries.

Before I got to the car, my phone buzzed. How was your experience? Rate us one to five stars. Tell us about your visit. Would you recommend us to a friend?

I would not recommend batteries to a friend. My friends know where batteries are.

Everything wants a review

The oil change wants a review. The doctor's office wants a review. The app wants a review of the app, inside the app, while I'm trying to use the app. The delivery driver wants five stars, because on some apps anything less can count against him. So now I'm grading a stranger's livelihood based on whether a box showed up.

The receipt has a survey code on the bottom. The survey has a survey at the end of it, asking how the survey was.

The scale is broken anyway

Here's the thing everyone knows and nobody says: five stars means "fine." Four stars means something went wrong. Three stars is a cry for help. Nobody uses the scale the way it's drawn, so the numbers don't mean what they look like they mean.

What I'd like instead

If something goes wrong, I'll tell you. I'm Gen X. Telling people when something is wrong is one of our main hobbies.

If everything went fine, the silence is the review. No news is good news. That system worked for decades.

And if you really need to ask, ask once, give me one tap to answer and then leave me alone. Don't follow me home. Don't send a reminder. Don't tell me my feedback is important to you while making it as annoying as possible to give.

Rate this post below. I already know how it ends.