Their Review is Your Preview

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Past is Prologue, People

More than 90% of us modern, online shoppers read reviews before making a purchase or deciding where to spend our money. That’s nine out of every ten of us, and the jury is still out as to whether number ten just doesn’t read at all or is supremely confident in every decision they make.

For the rest of us, we peruse those reviews.

It makes sense to do so; if you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. And each review written is another page in the history of a product, restaurant, or service. Even though books with et. al authors were a pain to cite, crowds have large voices, crowds are authors of the public sentiment. They lift up what’s good, what’s important, and diminish what’s worth forgetting.

Take cave paintings for instance. We see mammoths, horses, and deer pretty often, but not so much chicken, fish, or lean cuisines. Sure, we could accept that cave paintings are art or arcane storytelling, but they could just as easily be the earliest reviews ever written. This deer here? It gets five pointed spears for the exciting chase and the tasty meat. This mammoth? Just one crushed man. Would not attack again. This WALL? How about a hand for this wall? Or maybe just a bunch of handprints, okay, yeah, that works too.

Any way you look at them, cave paintings still highlighted what was important for our upright ancestors to note, and present-day reviews fulfill that same purpose.

Oh, so everyone is saying these purple Calvin Klein boxer briefs run small; you’d best order a size up (even better is if CK notes the size issue in the item description itself). Hey, there’s a long wait time at this paleteria y neveria. We should save ice cream for later unless you want to be late for the matinee movie prices.

This toy breaks, that cream smells, those shoes wear out- all bits of information collected by your predecessors, those who have had their hands on product, who have had their palates sated, who have either rejoiced or regretted having spent their time and money.

So do like we all do, and read their reviews. It may always be a leap of faith to order something online or try a new restaurant, but it might be more of a low hop if you read a few reviews first. We can learn a lot from them.

Unless they happen to be a robot or a spammer, someone with a grudge or someone being compensated for their words. Sometimes people are provided free products in exchange for nothing more than their reviews.

We might not want to learn from them (except maybe how they secured that perk). But that is a topic for another day.