There’s something faintly dystopian about being rated as a person. Consumer rating systems—those five-star verdicts on your conduct as a passenger, diner, or tenant—promise to distill accountability into a single tidy metric. But peel back the veneer, and what emerges is less a utopia of transparency and more a grim carnival of mutual suspicion. The stars don’t align; they collide, flattening nuanced human interactions into a transactional scoreboard.
The Illusion of Accountability
Take ridesharing platforms as an example. Drivers are encouraged to smile and nod while they silently grade your small talk or the coffee you dared bring along for the ride. Meanwhile, you’re nudged to rate them back, an instant judgment that ensures every interaction teeters on the brink of passive-aggressive politeness. This isn’t accountability; it’s enforced performance. Both parties walk away pretending their ratings system has ensured fairness, while the reality is closer to a Cold War of niceness. Each party fears the other’s score—the modern equivalent of mutually assured destruction, but with stars instead of missiles.
The illusion of objectivity is where these systems cut deepest. A five-star rating might look precise, but it’s as blunt as a spoon in a knife fight. Rate a driver four stars instead of five, and you’re not expressing a thoughtful critique; you’re jeopardizing their livelihood. “Five stars or bust” has become the silent mantra. Anything less signals abject failure, reducing a scale of supposed nuance to a binary thumbs-up or down. And that 0.3-star difference? It’s not just cosmetic; it can mean the difference between financial stability and a spiral into crisis. Yet bridging that gap is rarely straightforward—a single annoyed passenger, irritated by traffic or mourning the lack of guacamole in their tacos earlier, can easily deal a three-star blow. Improvement becomes a guessing game, as arbitrary as the ratings themselves, leaving individuals chasing an undefined ideal of perfection that depends less on their actions and more on someone else’s fleeting mood.
The Absurdity of Customer Ratings
In certain contexts, the absurdity becomes almost poetic. Picture a Michelin-starred restaurant rating its diners, or a luxury spa inviting therapists to score clients on their manners. These settings are built on asymmetry: the customer’s role is to bask, unjudged, in bespoke care. Slapping a rating system on top would obliterate the ethos of indulgence. How can you relax in the sauna if the attendant is busy evaluating whether your robe-folding technique deserves a four or five? Hospitality thrives on a silent contract: I’ll serve, and you’ll respect—without either of us scoring the exchange.
When Ratings Replace Trust
Then there’s healthcare, where patient ratings are creeping in like an uninvited guest at a wake. A doctor treating a difficult case now faces the added challenge of appeasing the patient’s mood, lest they suffer a one-star vengeance review. The inherent vulnerability of healthcare relationships—a doctor’s duty to be honest, a patient’s need to trust—collapses when turned into a performance review. Imagine withholding a critical diagnosis because you fear a low rating. Ratings, here, don’t just stifle candor; they undermine the integrity of care.
Even in more transactional arenas like ridesharing, the system reveals its cracks. For every mutual accountability success story, there’s a tale of a driver unfairly dinged for traffic—as if they control urban congestion—or a passenger scored low for not smiling enough. Or for smiling too much! A chatty rider might irritate someone who prefers silence, while a reserved passenger could be penalized by someone who expected friendly banter. These imbalances favor the rater, not the rated, reinforcing hierarchies rather than leveling them. Worse, they invite performativity: exaggerated cheerfulness, insincere gratitude, the artifice of an interaction designed for optics rather than substance.
Philosophically, these systems tread dangerous ground. Kant’s categorical imperative—treating others as ends in themselves, not means to an end—feels almost laughably at odds with a world where your Uber rating can dip for wearing the wrong perfume. This quantification of human interaction is dehumanizing, turning complex, context-rich relationships into sterile transactions. Bentham’s utilitarian calculus might justify ratings in theory (if they maximize happiness), but even his logic falters when the system fails to account for context. A low score isn’t just a number; it’s a scarlet letter, a mark of disapproval devoid of nuance or recourse.
Yet, my quarrel isn’t with technology itself. These systems didn’t invent our hunger for judgment; they merely digitized it. If anything, they’re a reflection of our broader discomfort with ambiguity. Why navigate the murky waters of feedback when you can slap a number on it and call it a day? The problem lies not in the tool but in its application. By plastering ratings onto every corner of human interaction, we’ve reduced our relationships to their lowest common denominator: “How did I do?”
There’s an irony here worth savoring. These systems, designed to improve trust, often erode it instead. Real trust—the kind built on mutual understanding and forgiveness—requires friction, the occasional misstep, the awkward but necessary conversations that ratings systems make redundant. Instead, we’re left with a sanitized, frictionless mimicry of trust, where a five-star rating stands in for real connection.
Who Rates the Raters?
To rate consumers is to misunderstand the nature of service itself. The best interactions—in hospitality, healthcare, or even ridesharing—aren’t reducible to metrics. They’re symbiotic, unpredictable, sometimes messy. By slapping a star system on everything, we risk losing the very humanity these services are meant to foster. Worse still, there is no mechanism to rate the architects of these flawed systems themselves—the ones who contribute to making hospitality culture shallow but evade accountability for its erosion. For instance, at a Walmart in Canada, I shopped for a $30 LEGO set for my son. It was locked behind one of those clear plastic cabinets. I had to scan a code to summon an associate and wait, annoyed. Later, the app asked me to “rate my experience” on a five-star scale. I was ready to select one star when I noticed additional options: “No one showed up,” “Not friendly,” “Not helpful.” How absurd! I wanted to rate the system, not the associate frantically running around the store. Fearful of unfairly dinging the employee, I refrained, though I wished for the ability to give the decision-makers a one-star review for implementing such a poor process. So the next time you’re tempted to rate your Uber driver four stars for “lack of small talk,” or worse, penalize them for smiling too much or too little, maybe ask yourself: who really deserves the low rating here?