If you read that title and immediately thought “Well, no duh. You don’t have to explain that to me,” then congratulations! You are officially smarter than the husband and wife team behind The Local Scoop, an ice cream shop in Bay Minette, Alabama, which has been making headlines for the wrong reasons.
A man named Daniel Smitt wanted some ice cream and decided to visit The Local Scoop during its grand opening back in March. Smitt didn’t have a positive experience and left a one star review.
Smitt himself admitted that he didn’t think anything of it until the subsequent incident – although Malary and Ryan Goldman, the owners of Local Scoop, took it far more personally.
Three months later, on June 7, Malary Goldman was driving and recognized Smitt at a stoplight while he was doing a food delivery for DoorDash. Malary asked to “speak” with him about the review; Smitt agreed, and the two parked in a McDonald’s parking lot. The conversation immediately became hostile, with the full 15 minute video having been captured and uploaded.
Malary at one point says to Smitt “We know where you live, I spoke with your Mom, I’ve got your phone number. Somebody that you messaged on Facebook Dating gave me that,” indicating that this was not an incidental encounter during a rough day and that Malary had actively tracked down Smitt’s personal information and identity. Malary continued her tirade, with her husband Ryan joining her and making similar insults against Smitt, who fired back in turn.
Malary escalated things sharply by making a threat against Smitt, and Smitt also claimed that his phone was knocked out of his hand and stomped on it.
The video promptly blew up, gaining thousands of views on Reddit and even becoming a topic of discussion by YouTuber MoistCr1TiKaL, where it has over 1.4 million views.
The fallout from the subsequent media firestorm has not looked good for the husband and wife. Malary and Ryan were both arrested and charged with harassment and criminal mischief, and harassment, respectively. The Local Scoop’s ice cream supplier has also allegedly stopped supplying them, and predictably, their Yelp page is now awash in negative reviews though these are currently being suppressed by Yelp’s filter.
Malary has since issued a statement apologizing to Smitt and her local community, alleging that her personal information was spread and that she received death threats. Smitt has apologized in turn and is seeking have the charges dropped to allow everyone to move on.
Even if the charges end up being dropped it’s a fair bet that they’ll be dealing with the consequences of this for a long time. At minimum, when you search for the business name or the names of either owner, you now get page after page of the viral video full of comments and replies that are overwhelmingly not sympathetic to the husband and wife.
I have 200 small business and nonprofit clients and as one can imagine, I’ve had a first row seat to a lot of one star reviews, for reasons ranging from fair to petty to completely unreasonable.
I’ve said before that even if you have overwhelmingly positive reviews on the Internet’s most prominent public forum, it can be a frustrating, exhausting and demoralizing experience to see a negative review featured prominently as the most recent review. It hits especially hard if it’s a particularly generic complaint or somebody upset that their food took 16 minutes to arrive rather than the promised 15. You’ll often get the impression that the reviewer was just having a bad day and your business ended up in their crosshairs for whatever reason.
I also noted that I appreciate how personal these negative reviews can feel. In a world where positive or negative sentiment online does genuinely impact your search engine visibility, it can feel like a huge slap in the face even among a flood of positive comments, and especially when you’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into a business.
Here’s the problem: Remember in my previous article when I said that these reviewers probably just irritably left a bad review, went about their lives and never thought about your business again? Smitt essentially confirms this when noted in a comment that he leaves reviews all the time – good and bad – and that he never thought of the Local Scoop review further until the encounter three months later.
You might argue that Smitt is was being unfair or careless for casually leaving negative reviews. That’s a fair argument to make. Even so, step back and really consider what happened here. Smitt spent a few seconds leaving a one-star review, which he instantly forgot about until the incident three months later. The owners, meanwhile, allegedly proceeded to go to war, identifying Smitt, obtaining his personal information, and ultimately initiating an incident that resulted in criminal charges, a viral video, and the worst kind of national attention.
While I certainly believe the overwhelming majority of business owners are smarter than to go this far, this should be an object lesson in what being able to “confront” someone who leaves a one star review really gets you.
Let’s look at the impact on the business itself. Smitt’s review seems to have been removed (likely by Smitt himself, though there’s no way to verify this), but consider the tradeoff. If local comments are to be believed, the business is currently getting savaged in local social media groups. Their ice cream supplier has cut ties with them. Their Facebook page – which acted as the website link in their Google Business profile (which miraculously has not been review bombed) – appears to have been disabled or just deleted entirely. Most tellingly, the business reputation online has been tied to the viral video and the subsequent arrest of Malary and Ryan, possibly permanently.
Beyond the business itself, Malary and Ryan now have to go through an expensive, terrifying, and stressful ordeal even if the charges end up being dropped. If their own accounts are to be believed, they’re facing harassment themselves. This incident is going to follow both of them independently of The Local Scoop for years, if not longer.
The deeply ironic part about all of this is that many business owners fantasize about confronting reviews, “exposing” the reviewer, or getting to explain their side of the story. Even if you get the confrontation you dream about, and even if the review gets removed (as this one presumably was), it rarely produces vindication. More often, it just makes the problem of an ultimately ephemeral negative review ten times worse.
This is where we arrive at a much bigger problem. When you have as many small business and nonprofit clients as I do, you often have a courtside seat to some very unhappy reactions to negative reviews, and I’ve had to talk people down from some very risky ledges. I’ve seen legal threats and owners publicly argue with customers in highly incendiary language. I’ve seen people become consumed by just a few negative ratings – not even comments. Which is why this story stands out even to me.
The issue is that if you’ve reached a point where you’re willing to physically track down and harass a customer who left a negative review, the review clearly isn’t the problem anymore.
If you’ve become so obsessed with negative criticism online that you’re prepared to harass people in public, you don’t have the perspective left to healthily run a business – let alone one that engages with the public.
I’m not saying you can’t be upset or frustrated at negative reviews. That’s human and it’s normal, especially when the criticism is completely unfounded, unfair or detached from reality. I’m certainly not arguing that Google Reviews are always a robust, intellectual forum of enlightened opinions.
The question is a simple one: At what point does frustration become obsession? More importantly, is the obsession worth potentially burning your own business to the ground? Because if Local Scoop doesn’t survive this, it certainly won’t be because of Smitt’s review.
I once brokered a deal with a former client who would reply furiously to every single negative review he received. We deleted his Google Business app on his phone and he agreed to simply not look at Google Reviews at all, deferring entirely to me, since he acknowledged that he couldn’t handle it.
He lasted less than 72 hours.
In less than three days he had logged back in and angrily told a reviewer off. When I asked him what happened, he admitted he “couldn’t help it.” At that point, I walked away.
I use that story as a cautionary tale because in that case, the reviews were never the problem. The inability to handle them or even resist the urge to respond to them is.
It’s why the Local Scoop story is such a case study beyond the laugh everyone is having online. The Internet is a public forum and every business owner gets criticism at some point, often manifesting through unfair reviews. Some business owners entertain the idea of confronting customers, but most never act on those impulses. Others don’t even entertain the idea at all, simply recognizing that it really is nothing personal on the part of the people leaving the reviews.
When someone becomes so obsessed by a negative review that they’re willing to track down a strange, confront them months later in public, and allegedly commit crimes over it, the review isn’t the issue anymore. The issue is that any sense of perspective is gone. When you’ve reached that point, you can potentially do far more damage to your business than any negative review ever could. Just ask the owners of Local Scoop.