It’s a nightmare. You just opened up your take-out box and you’re looking at a turkey sandwich instead of a ham one. If you’re a spiteful person you might head to Google reviews to give that restaurant a piece of your mind.

You can rate pretty much anything on Google reviews, but restaurants are the ones who get the most reviews and see the biggest impact.

Eric Lee owns Yuzu Bowl and Sushi Sai in downtown Kelowna. Both restaurants have 4.7 stars on Google with hundreds of reviews. He said businesses should focus on their food and service to let the rave reviews roll in and ignore angry reviews.

“It’s important because we are a tourist city and people use Google maps a lot to get around. When they look for restaurants, that’s their number one search engine,” Lee said. “If you’re having a bad day, nothing tastes right. Everything seems offensive.”

Lee said he hasn’t pushed customers to write positive reviews and doesn’t engage with people who write negative things online.

Over in Kamloops, Jeff Mitton of Mittz Kitchen said it can help to ask customers for a good review and respond to negative comments.

“Any feedback is good feedback,” he said. “If you get a negative review, make sure you’re responding to those reviews directly on Google so that people can see that you care about fixing the issues and you have a side to it.”

Dr. Limin Fang is an associate professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business and she studies Google reviews. She said restaurants get the most reviews out of any industry by a large margin.

“A laundromat, or a tailor, the businesses like that, they don’t receive a lot of reviews. And usually when they do receive reviews, it’s highly inflated,” she said.

When a restaurant’s Google review rating goes up by one star it correlates to a slight increase in traffic, roughly a few per cent higher.

“It was not statistically significant. . . But in general, we could see that the demand is highly correlated with the star ratings,” she said.

Most Google reviews, around half, don’t have any text. The reviews with the most text are one star reviews. Fang said a five-star review with a big paragraph about the experience would be a boon for a business.

“The review length is becoming shorter and shorter. So I think people just have less and less time,” she said.

Lee said there are going to be some reviews that you have to shake off, and some that make your day as a restaurateur. Businesses ought to focus on delivering a good experience rather than gaming the review system, especially for new restaurants whose rating can cary dramatically based on one bad review.

“Sometimes people get too attached to it,” he said. “If you provide good service, if you provide good food, if you do all that, it will jump back up.”