Streisand Effect : restaurant sues a bad review and gets bad publicity

In France, you're allowed to write a bad review about a restaurant in your blog, but apparently, you're not allowed to be referenced by Google too high, or you could get sued.

Photo used in the original post

This is what happened to Caroline Doudet, under the name "L'Irrégulière" on her blog Les Chroniques Culturelles, when she shared her disappointment about a dinner she had at Il Giardino in Cap Ferret, southwest of France. She deleted the blog post after the judgement, although it is still accessible on archive.org. For those who can't read French, the opinion column is titled "The place to avoid in Cap Ferret: Il Giordano", it is a chronological description of what happened that evening, from the moment they entered the restaurant until the check and finishes with "I incite you to blacklist [the restaurant] if you come in the area" followed by the address.

Her complaints in the whole post are numerous: bad service (with multiple examples), unfriendly and non-business-minded owner, low quality meals. Her points are backed by examples and we can feel the unpleasantness of the dinner through the words.

Ten months later, the disappointed customer got fined 2,500€ for "denigration" (1,500€ for the restaurant, 1,000€ for the justice fees) and constrained to change the title of her blog post (as I mentioned earlier, she decided to delete it altogether instead).

The restaurant, primarily but non-exclusively serving pizzas, thought they had won. That dreadful publicity, ranked on the first page on Google searches, was doomed to disappear. That was without thinking of the repercussions of that conviction. Media recounted the judgement. To nobody's surprise though, potential customers were not happy with the decision and started giving bad reviews on websites like TripAdvisor (with one listing it as Streisand favorite restaurant and grading it one star out of five a few days ago) or on Google Plus (average of 1.3 out of 5 after 194 reviews).

For those unaware, this is called the Streisand Effect. By trying to censor something they considered bad (reportedly, before the judgement, the page had been read less than 500 times), they created a negative internet buzz that reached hundreds of times that number.

A little piece of advice to the owner: the best response to that review was not to censor it, but to prove it was wrong by providing a good service that would call for good reviews. Free speech, even though attacked from all sides, is a concept that people are very attached to, and any blow towards it will probably have a negative effect on the attacker. I'm even sure that if the fine had been higher, Caroline Doudet wouldn't have had to pay it but the internet would have organized to help her raise that money.

This is one of the most noticeable market effect. I know I won't ever go eat in that restaurant. Without that judgement, it was possible. Thanks to the defense of free speech, I got to read that blog post that I would never have read otherwise. You'll never see me, Il Giardano.

French anti-Amazon law

Today came into effect a law here in France that is nicknamed "anti-Amazon law". Of course, the law doesn't cite Amazon, but the intentions behind the text was clearly and loudly announced to protect small bookstores against the international online competitor.

To have a full understanding of the story, a little background is probably needed, especially for those who have no knowledge of french laws about books. A few decades ago, politician were afraid that small bookstores would be destroyed by the competition of big malls that could sell books for a lower price. So, the government established something called "le prix unique du livre". It can be translated to "book's unique price". In effect, it means that when a book is first published, an advised price is settled, and it is forbidden to sell it for less than this price minus 5%. (Example: settled price 10€, nobody can sell it for less than 9.50€)

So, for a little more than 30 years, there's been no concurrence in France on book prices. As often though, the intended protection for bookstores never existed. The rate at which they disappeared is the same as in any other comparable country, where such laws didn't exist. The only everlasting effect was then that the lack of competition on book prices artificially keeps them at a higher level than in the US for instance: a net loss for the French reader.

Then Amazon came into our lives. The French version of the website still followed the local laws and applied the "no-less-than-5%" rule. To make their service appealing to their intended customers, they instated a free delivery for books, first on all order above twenty euros, then, a few years later, on all orders.

The same way it is anywhere else in the world, Amazon.fr is now a leader in the world of book selling in France. They achieve that by offering their customers what they want: prices as low as possible, an enormous catalog of items and a system of reviews and advice for finding your next purchase. Bookstores, for the most part, are still struggling.

Politicians then had a new great idea a year or so ago. "Let's try to slow down Amazon and bring back the readers to small bookstores." That's what lead to the new law voted two weeks ago. What the text of the law number 2014-779 of July 8 of 2014 (pdf) says -- my own translation:

 "When a book is delivered to the buyer and is not picked up directly in a bookstore, the selling price will be the price settled by the editor or the importing agent. The seller can remove 5% of this price off the delivery fee he chooses, without being able to make it a free delivery."

 A direct attack towards e-bookstores, Amazon in the first place. Today's reply by Amazon France probably surprised no one but the politicians behind that law. They announced on their website than sadly, they can't apply the 5% discount on the books they're selling, and they can't apply a free delivery to their orders. Instead, they decided to set the price to 0.01€ for the delivery.

Let's have a quick look at the actual effects of that law.

• Prices online have increased to reach the level they are in actual bookstores. 
• Delivery is still artificially free. 

For the customer, books more expansive, for Amazon, a raise in revenue of 5% on each order. Maybe the orders will decrease by a tiny amount, but overall, I think they'll gain money out of this. Because ordering books online is convenient, and that's nothing a bookstore can compete with.

The big error that bookstore owners and politicians make here is that they want to be on equal foot with Amazon. But that is simply impossible. Logistics and stocks are both in favor of the multinational company. That doesn't mean that physical bookstores have to disappear. But here's an advice, don't try to compete with Amazon with lobbying for new laws. Adapt!

http://librairie-expression.com/

I actually like bookstores. I like to wander in their alleys to try and find new novels to read. From what I've seen on the internet, a lot of people feel the same. I don't want them to disappear, and for that, there's one solution that the US bookstores should think of also. Adapt your offer. Specialize in certain genres, and personalize your offer, your advice. Adjoin your store to a coffee shop, a tearoom or just a reading room with a few baked goods. These are just the first ideas that pop in my head, but I think that's the way to go.

These are services that Amazon can't offer and they won't be able to compete with you.

The (Real) New Beginning

My new year's resolutions have turned out to be impossible to follow. Work, moving out, refereeing, and just daily life. I have spent the last six months not writing at all. January hasn't been my rebirth, surprisingly July has. In the middle of the FIFA World Cup, I started writing again.

I set myself a weekly routine that I will try to follow as much as I can, and that very blog post is part of it. Every Thursday, I will publish a new blog post on here, about anything that I will think is interesting enough to be shared. Other tasks are writing at least six hundred words on Mondays and Tuesdays, and maybe on Sundays. Fridays will be dedicated to the rewriting process for stories that need to be edited and rebuilt.

My Wednesdays will be about another one of my goal, still related to writing, but on another level. I'm creating a website that allow people to share their own Science-Fiction and Fantasy short stories online. The site will allow feedback in the means of commentaries and grades. I will first develop it in French, and depending on its success and my motivation, I probably will transpose it to English a few months after the French version's first launching.

That website has been on my mind for a while, and I think my new motivation to write and to develop that website has been brought by the purchase of my new laptop. I only had a desktop before, which always fulfilled me as a gamer, but the freedom a laptop gives you to work wherever you want was something I needed, I realize now.

I haven't mentioned what my Saturdays will be about: nothing. To be more precise, I won't impose myself anything to do of that kind on Saturdays. I will enjoy the company of my beautiful wife and my silly cat. If inspiration strikes me, I'm not stopping myself from writing or working on the website, but I think Saturdays will very much be about relaxing as much as possible.

I still have a job after all, I'm still a soccer referee, and a soccer player. I'm still a gamer, even though my implication on video games have decreased a lot during the past few years. But I'll always enjoy a good Starcraft, Football Manager or even an oldie like Baldur's Gate.

I mentioned my wife earlier, and I need to say that I am very proud that her photography business makes her people, even if it's not always easy, doing all she does in a foreign language, in a foreign country. You can see her work on her website and on Facebook. Amazing is one of the words that describe it. (Example on the left).

Enough ramble for tonight. See you next Thursday, or you can insult me if I don't write another post next week.