After I posted my Yelp review (but not before), the new owner got in touch with me via email and wrote in a polite way. The new owner wrote "We wanted to take this opportunity to apologize to you for the late reply", making it appear as if it was not due to the negative review that the owner decided to respond at all. But all right, I decided to become engaged in the process to try to resolve the issue. They offered one 1-hr massage with my favorite masseur, Mike: "Meanwhile, we can offer you a free 1-hour foot massage with Mike or another staff of your choice and the store will pay for your visit to compensate for the inconvenience that you might have. " Note that this offer was not conditional on my removing the negative review. I reviewed the log of visits sent to me and compared it with the automatic emails that get sent each time an appointment is scheduled, whether scheduling is via email, phone, or Mindbody. In that log I saw 2 visits in June that did not have a corresponding email. So according to the emails, I had 8 visits and according to the log sent to me, I had 10. I wrote: "This is why out of the 10 visits you think I had, there were only 8 I did have. I am attaching screenshots. I hope this can remove the confusion and I can get 2 services from my package scheduled soon, as well as the complimentary service with Mike you nicely offered to me to compensate for the inconvenience and the time I have spent and might still need to spend to resolve this issue. "
I also wrote, on my own initiative: "Once it is resolved, I will remove the Yelp review that speaks of you unfavorably provided you first remove the 5 star review of the business written by the business owner."
The old owner, Ivy, got involved at this point (I copied her on my email) and said that she would look into this issue. She also wrote to me:
"Btw, I was never contacted by this issue.
Ivy"
In other words, the new owner had not contacted Ivy before I did.
Ivy provided a phone call log that showed that I called her in June. So we concluded that I did have two appointments in June of which I do not have a record and somehow the system malfunctioned two times and did not send emails confirming scheduling. In sum, I trusted Ivy's phone records.
The new owner then wrote to me: "We believe Ivy's reply resolved the issue. However, we can still compensate you for the confusion that may have occurred regardless of whose fault it is. We can still offer you a free one-hour foot massage with our staff of your choice if you can delete the review you had for our new listing. It has hugely impacted our business reputation since these are not the truth based on our understanding, your package doesn't have any more sessions remaining." - the owner wrote as if my review had been only about appointments without matching records and not about the owner who wrote a 5 star review of their own business, nor about the new owner's rudeness and lack of responsiveness.
I then checked on here and saw that the owner had removed their own review. I emailed:
"I see that you have removed your self-serving 5 star review of your own business. Do you intend to continue staying out of violating Yelp content guidelines? I have a copy of the review you posted. Further, what I wrote is still true in that it reports on how rude you were PRIOR to my posting the review. Had I not posted the review, you would not have bothered. Still, if you promise me that you will not post 5 star reviews of your own business, I will remove my review. "
The owner did NOT promise not to post more 5 star reviews of their own business, nor did the owner fess up that they had done so until I called them on it. Instead, the new owner wrote to me:
"Besides, thank you for your caring for the Yelp policy. This is our thing to discuss with Yelp. Our attitude was not rude. We are just informing you that based on what we see on your account. We are not a charity business, we can't say you still have visites left when you actually don't. In addition, we tried to explain to you multiple times for your visit history. In addition, the change of ownership, as mentioned previously, was on July 1, 2022. We offer free one hour massage is to compensate for your emotionotnot because its our fault. We are still offering it to you because we wanted to keep our promise to you. Now the issue has been resolved, but we are still keeping our promise. We hope you can delete the review, if you want to delete we will take legal actions to protect our reputation as it's not the truth. "
Note that they were not keeping the promise. The 1 hour with Mike was offered to compensate me for the inconvenience and not conditionally upon my removing the review. Later, the offer was made conditional.
The price that the owner tried to extract from me for that one hour massage with Mike was too high: I would rather keep and update my Yelp review.
Clearly, I won't be back but will miss Mike a lot. read more