Why does everyone want your 5-star rating?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The request for five stars — from airport parking lots, orthopedists or even your local liquor store — seems to be filling our inboxes more and more every single day. But do our reviews and ratings even matter?
Host Elahe Izadi chats with feature reporter Ashley Fetters Maloy about review culture, how our feedback can transform businesses big and small, and why our ratings are reshaping our relationship to companies and ourselves. So, if you’ve read this far, make sure to listen to our show then rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.
Today’s show was produced by Thomas Lu with help from Peter Bresnan and Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was mixed by Sean Carter. And edited by Ted Muldoon with help from Maggie Penman.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Ashley. |
| 0:04.2 | Hey, how are you? |
| 0:05.9 | I'm good. |
| 0:06.5 | You know, I wanted to tell you a story. |
| 0:08.9 | So I recently went on a short vacation to Vermont. |
| 0:12.6 | And the night I got back in my email, I received an email from the hotel saying, we loved having you. |
| 0:20.4 | Hope you did too. If so, please consider leaving a review on Google or TripAdvisor. |
| 0:25.8 | Next email. United Airlines emailed me, saying your feedback means the world to us. How likely are you to |
| 0:33.2 | recommend United to a friend, relative, or colleague? And I have to tell you, like, in that moment, |
| 0:38.0 | I was like, I don't know, because the plane touched down and then went right back up. The pilot |
| 0:43.7 | did a go-round. But I got home safe. So, you know, I guess 10 stars, I'm home safe. Like, fine. |
| 0:49.9 | But the one that really got me was I received. There's another one. There's another email that I received from the airport parking garage. |
| 0:59.7 | Stop. |
| 1:01.6 | Saying, tell us about your recent parking stay. |
| 1:05.5 | And I'm like, parked there, got the car after? |
| 1:09.3 | I've never received quite a stack like that, but orthopedic |
| 1:12.8 | surgeon and my cardiologist both recently asked me for Google reviews, which felt kind of surreal. |
| 1:17.6 | Yeah. Ashley Feders-Malloy is a features and culture reporter for The Post, and she says this |
| 1:23.6 | experience of being bombarded to rate and review is not unique. |
| 1:29.4 | She's been reporting on the rise in requests for feedback from every imaginable business and service provider. |
| 1:37.7 | Once I started thinking about that, it was like the next question was, what do they mean? |
| 1:43.0 | Like, why are they so important now? |
... |
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