Every now and then someone will post a Yelp review related to one of our various parties or businesses and we would like to publicly respond to it. Yelp has decided that they won't let you do that unless your business account has a human face as its avatar: no logos allowed. And they apparently employ an army of underpaid outsourced schmucks to enforce this by actually looking at and flagging every uploaded photo.

Of course they don't enforce this on all accounts, oh no. There's a logo instead of a face for Starbuck's, Best Buy, the ballpark... But when we have our staff meeting and six of us sit around and collectively formulate our official response, they insist that our company have the wrong face attached before we can publish it.

After weeks of trying, Barry finally managed to get a Yelp ad rep on the phone to complain about this -- basically saying, "I'm going to buy ads with you as soon as you fix this" -- and her response was to rant at length about how much it sucks to work at Yelp now, and how she can't get anything done.

"So, I want to give you money if you fix this, and you're saying you can't?"

"That's right. I can't fix it. You're not the only person who wants this, and your not the only person whose business I've lost over it. My employer is making it impossible for me to do my job."

Well played, Yelp! Well played.

Honestly, I wish there was a way for us to just opt out of Yelp entirely. It is far more of a pain in the ass than a benefit, in every way. I would even pay them to ensure that when you search for my businesses' names, you got a 404.

Sadly they do not offer that service, either.

Update: Don't miss part 2 of this story!