Vernon Wendy's Accused of Positive-Review Scheme

The Vernon Wendy's is being accused of offering free meals to people in exchange for a positive review at the Vernon location. The Manchester Scoop has received reports from two individuals that they were approached on Tuesday February 19th inside the Wendy's after purchasing their food.

The manager approached the two individuals while they were eating and offered a free meal to each person who agreed to write an 'Honest' review of the restaurant. However, this was not the case, the manager expected a positive review of the fast food restaurants. The Wendy's in Vernon has been plagued by bad service since their opening in November 2018.

One individual stated "The Manager comes up to us and said if we fill out a survey, the next time we come in we'd get a free meal, and she grabbed a receipt from the back (because we never received ours), she showed us the website for reviews, and handed us a business card for her to sign after," she continued "We did the survey and just filled it out honestly, in the end we said we didn't want our (personal) information posted, then we got the code to show the manager that we filled out the survey."

Their bad experience didn't end there. The manager became aware that the reviews were not positive. The individual continues "She comes up to us and asked if we said the service was slow, we said no, and she told us she asked for a positive review not an honest review, and the ones we gave were negative because her score went down. We just left after being castigated by the manager."​

The restaurant has seen an onslaught of negative reviews on Yelp, they have a rating of one and a half stars. Some reviews are written below:

"Food is always very slow, even when there are plenty of workers on and no other customers and our order is ALWAYS missing something. We live less than 10 minutes away and yet our food is cold when we get home between waiting for them to actually give it to us and then needing to go in to have our order fixed. Very disappointed and I've given them several chances since they opened."
-Carissa

"Every time we go food has been forgotten,cold or just wrong on top of that your waiting at least 1/2 hour to 45 minutes to get the wrong order.went today and of course they forgot 3 different things so I go in and the manager wanna give a look like I'm just trying to get some free food after I just spent $30. I'll stick with the Manchester one never had a issue with them not once."
-Jill

"SLOWEST EVER! Staff is disorganized, doesn't care. I was happy we were getting a Wendy's but I won't return. After weeks they still don't have their sh!t together. It's sad that so many feel this way."
-Gene

The Manchester Scoop reached out to Wendy's corporate for comment, in which a representative stated 'We will alert the higher management team at this Wendy's, and will forward comments to our corporate management team.'

Paying for positive review is not illegal in the state of Connecticut, although other states like New York have adopted legislation making it illegal for businesses to pay for positive reviews. Incentivizing reviews is legal, but incentives are not given based on the overall attitude of the review. It is deeply unethical to attempt to positively change their rating by paying for better reviews.

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