If you order McDonalds, you probably know what McDonalds should taste like. If it meets 100% of your expectations, why would you rate it lower?

Similarly, if I get a meal from Michelin Star rated restaurant and it fails to meet my high expectations, should it get a better rating than McDonald's just because the restaurants meal was still likely much better than McDonald's even if it failed to meet expectations?

In practical terms it dilutes the value of 4 and 5 star reviews for other restaurants. There's some cognitive dissonance involved when McDonald's gets a 4.6/5 and a mom and pop haute-cuisine restaurant gets a 4.6/5 as well. These are two very different dining experiences but they are being judged using the same system and feels inaccurate.

For what McDonalds is they probably deliver a 5 star review the way their customers see it. You probably have to divide restaurants into different categories and compare within them. I beat a lot of people will rate MCDonalds higher than haute cuisine restaurants even in direct comparison. There is no absolute rating for restaurants.

If in direct comparison they rate McDonald's higher, then that's fine... McDonald's is a huge business, they obviously have people who like them.

But it should be a direct comparison, I certainly think KFC is far superior to most haute cuisine fried chicken.

There is no sensible way to compare fine dining to McDonald's.

The rating should be based on how well they deliver what they purport to deliver. If McDonald's delivers the absolute epitome of a fast-food burger and fries then it should get a 5/5, even if tastier food can be found at other restaurants.

Haute cuisine with a mediocre execution should get a 3/5 even if it's tastier than a McDonald's hamburger.

From a utility standpoint, I mean, yeah. You should definitely rate McDonalds lower than a restaurant with food you liked better, if people want to search for "how was the food" divided by "cost of the food" that's obviously a sliding scale that depends on the person. Maybe it should be something you can sort by, but I don't see how you could possibly reconcile ratings from different people if they all give five stars for any restaurant that meets their expectations.

Experience vs. expectations is the only reasonable way to interpret user-based scores even if they are not astroturfed. The problem is that you don't always know what the average user's expectations are and how they compare to your own and there is no basis for comparing scores between different objects.

This I think stems from a different issue. Doordash has a very easy, one second review they ask from everyone. And I think 99.999% of folks think “oh yeah that was fine, 4 stars” or “it was pretty good, five stars.” Do people get what they expected from that McDonald’s? Was it cheap, fast and nostalgic? 5 stars.

The people doing these reviews are not good critics, or critical with any sort of depth.

They are the sort of folks that get doordash to bring them McDonald’s.

There is also unevenly distributed cultural knowledge: anything less than five stars starts causing hassle for the driver. I hate this inflation but I also wanna make sure the person who gave me competent service that I would realistically mark as three stars - not bad, not great, job done exactly as specified and I'm perfectly happy with that - is going to get five.

(hassle varies: offered fewer/worse-paying jobs is a good start)

When I moved to California for a while I once made the mistake of describing my food at a restaurant with "fine, thanks" when the server asked how it was.

Apparently this translates very differently in the culture of the Bay Area where it means something like "I am very upset" whereas in Boston I think this roughly would be read as "I am satisfied, but don't really feel like chatting."

Randomly reminded me of George Carlin's bit on that.

It’s like “fine.” Another weak word.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

Bullshit! Nobody’s fine. Hair is fine.

“How’s your hair?”

“Fine.”

That makes a lot more sense to me.

There are clever words and/or phrases which do (or did) translate quite differently in British vs. American English. Starting with "clever" and "quite".

Key generally being that on a scale of 1--10, Brits tend to hover in the 5.00000003 to 5.000000031 range. Any deviation from that is an extreme reaction.

"Good" is a California "fine", and "fine" is a California "pox be upon you".

I've given up on leaving reviews. For 3 stars to be average, you need to actually give average reviews to some things, thus I rate almost everything as 3 stars which results in the "what went wrong", "Nothing, you were average, just like everyone else". I got sick of that exchange and gave up. Doing better than average is almost impossible in my book because almost everyone is doing their best. Sometimes someone will mess up and get a 1, but not often, and not bad enough that they make enough of a difference as to raise everyone else to 5.

Also, I just don't buy enough of most things to honestly know. Is Brand X thing better than Brand Y - how should I know? I don't have the time to spend a week trying each item to give a fair review. I happened to choose Brand X, and it is fine but it might really be far worse than Brand Y if only I had tried the other in stead.

This reminds of me leaving reviews on Uber or Lyft. A perfectly fine ride is a 5/5 because anything less than that hurts the driver. In reality I just need a binary "Satisfactory? Y/N" and then maybe an optional extended rating for leaving feedback if anything was out of the ordinary, good or bad.

good points. maybe that makes all the difference between Doordash compared to Google/Yelp, where McDonalds is more along the lines of 1 or 2 out of 5.

it means Doordash ratings are useless for discovery, but if you already know the restaurant, it might have utility in terms of delivery.

Isn't this just the logical consequence of the "less than 5 stars means you want them punished" mentality popularised by Uber?

It was popularized at least as far back as eBay (albeit as a positive/neutral/negative scale). "Seller shipped me an empty box but at least there wasn't dynamite in it. A+++++++ seller."

I do think restaurant and product ratings are a bit different. With Uber, eBay, etc., a lot of people recognize that any less than perfect rating can lead to a personal impact on someone even if a small number of people leave a negative.

That said, many will leave good marks on satisfaction surveys because a middling mark may lead to someone reaching out to find out what the problem was and that can just be more hassle than it's worth.

Arguably the punishment side existed before the web then in US tipping etiquette.

But at least the eBay 'approve' asks you whether the vendor was adequate or not, not to give them the maximum on an entirely artificial multiplier scale unless you think they should face consequences.

>Arguably the punishment side existed before the web then in US tipping etiquette.

True. In general, even if service is bad for whatever reason, most people would say you should leave a tip even if a less generous one than you normally would.

I haven't left a rating on eBay for a long time and don't use it much. But for many situations there's something to be said for thumbs up/down or an up/neutral/down rating when you're not really trying to fine tune.

And I suspect the use of grades in US Highschools where anything that isnt an A is considered a failure is an element why every ones gives a 4 or 5

> are we really to believe that McDonalds has a rating of 4.6 out of 5?

Why shouldn’t it? You know what you are getting with McDonalds. For the price point they sell at, it is pretty good food. They are consistent. And they do a really good job with food safety, probably better than a lot of more highly rated restaurants (when was the last time you heard about an outbreak of a food borne illness at McDonalds)?

I very rarely eat at McDonalds because I don't like them for the most part. But, if I did, and I was promptly served what I ordered, why would I ding them because their burger isn't up to the standards of the (costlier) burger joint down the street or even Shake Shack.

They can both be 5/5 in terms of delivering the product you expect them to deliver.