Fourteen reviews, a 4.9, and a punctuation mark doing something nobody can explain
BAR’Z ART holds a 4.9 from fourteen reviews, which is not a rating.
But look at the apostrophe.
Where it should not be
It is between the R and the Z.
Which does not correspond to any rule in English punctuation.
An apostrophe marks a possessive – the bar’s art – or an omission, where a letter has been removed. And this one is doing neither.
It appears to be marking a plural, which is the one thing an apostrophe categorically does not do, and which is the error that causes more correspondence to British newspapers than any other.
The typo tier
Seven postcodes. Seven hundred and forty-eight articles. Six hundred venues.
And this is the eighth.
Te lion y unicorn, in Covent Garden – the royal coat of arms with the definite article amputated and the conjunction rendered, inexplicably, in Spanish.
ORIANI (Leadenhall ), in the City – with a trailing space before the bracket, permanently.
Bar Amercain, in Soho – missing a vowel, in a bar attached to one of the most beautiful rooms in London.
Seventy5th – a digit where a letter should be.
Boundary Rooftoop, in Shoreditch – an extra o, and it has been there for years.
Inda Pubs Ltd – a pub filed under a company registration.
And this.
Why nobody fixes it
Because the owner does not know, and because nobody has told them.
A business listing is created once, in about four minutes, by somebody doing eleven other things – and it is then never looked at again by the person who owns the business, who assumes it is correct.
And it is, meanwhile, the single most-read piece of text about that business in existence.
It is on every map. It is in every search result. It is the first thing several thousand people a year will ever see about the place.
The four minutes
Read your own listing. Once. Out loud.
Check the name. Check the address. Check the opening hours, which are wrong on a startling proportion of them. Check that the photograph is of your building.
It takes four minutes and it is the highest-return four minutes available to any small hospitality business in Britain.
And essentially nobody does it, because the listing feels like somebody else’s property.
It is not. It is the only shopfront most of your customers will ever see.
Verdict
Fourteen reviews. Not a rating.
Go, be the fifteenth, and mention the apostrophe.
What one field would fix
Every business listing form asks for a name.
It should ask for two: the legal name, and the name on the door – and it should display the second, and trim the whitespace, and run a spell check.
It would cost nothing. It would take an afternoon.
And it would rescue a whole category of small, undercapitalised venues who filled in a form nearly correctly and have been quietly punished for it ever since.
Nobody is going to do it, because nobody who builds these systems has ever stood behind a bar at nine on a Tuesday wondering where everybody is.
Oeko Angebot ([email protected])
Someone’s going to send this to their council with no comment. The silence will be more powerful than argument.
Criminal accuracy. Language.