Basic Trope: An unsatisfied customer threatens to leave a bad review.
- Straight: Spencer the Unsatisfiable Customer visits Mary's Eatery. He complains that there's a fly in his soup, and he'll give the restaurant a 1-star review on Yilp unless he gets a refund.
- Exaggerated: Spencer threatens to not only give the restaurant a 1-star review, but tell all his friends not to visit it and give his server a negative review on Grassdoor.
- Downplayed: Spencer says that he won't consider going back to Mary's Eatery unless the problem is fixed.
- Justified:
- The service at Mary's Eatery really was bad.
- Spencer knows that Mary is a Slave to PR, and a bad review will ruin her credibility.
- Inverted: Spencer, while being kicked out, pleads that he'll leave a glowing review if they let him stay.
- Subverted: Spencer tells Mary, "If you don't give me a refund, I'll..." and then logs into Yilp. He's actually rating a car dealership and not Mary's Eatery.
- Double Subverted: "...I'll give you a bad review too!"
- Parodied: Mary's Eatery's website contains a section listing various "glowing reviews": all of which are pathetic insults by customers threatening to leave bad ratings.
- Zig-Zagged: Spencer alternates between praising the restaurant and threatening to give it a bad rating as he goes through his meal.
- Averted: Spencer doesn't use review sites.
- Enforced: "We want to make Spencer look like an obnoxious person, so let's have him threaten the wait staff with a bad review."
- Lampshaded: "I'm going to leave a 1-star review unless you give me a refund!"
- Invoked: Spencer becomes one of the greatest food critics on the planet so he can make these threats hold quite a lot of weight.
- Exploited: Mary complies to Spencer's request, and he begins using this at other restaurants.
- Defied:
- Spencer would rather avoid giving bad reviews and tell the restaurant directly to improve their services.
- "Go ahead. Give us one star. And we'll post a link right next to the review for the security video of you threatening to kill the waiters. We'll burn together."
- Discussed: "Look, I understand that the concept of 'review-bombing' can be a pretty nasty little weapon of harassment nowadays, but that guy Spencer is just one extremely kooky dude. We are willing to give our best for our customers, but we are not obliged to be anybody's slaves, either. Especially not for a Yelp review."
- Conversed: "This guy says he's going to leave a bad review. Nobody actually goes through with that in real life."
- Deconstructed: Spencer gives a bad review to the restaurant just because of a fly in his soup. The restaurant eventually refuses to serve him should he come back.
- Reconstructed: Spencer still gives the restaurant a 1-star rating anyway for denying him their services.
- Played For Laughs:
- Spencer pretends to be a critic for a well-known periodical and threatens in an extremely loud voice for maximum embarrassment a fire-and-brimstone review in which he will accuse Mary's Eatery of everything from uncomfortable chairs to racism as a Bavarian Fire Drillnote .
- Spencer's lone one-star review makes an angry mob armed with Torches and Pitchforks besiege the diner within a second of it being posted.
- Spencer threatens to leave a bad review, so the Eatery deploys the special anti-bad-review bouncers, man-mountain Torture Technicians who drag Spencer to the little room at the back of the Eatery while Spencer screams he was not really going to do it and to have mercy.
- Spencer's threat to leave a bad review is a disproportionately feeble attempt at a threat that he yells while all sorts of life-threatening insanity is happening within the Eatery.
- Played for Drama:
- Mary kills Spencer so he won't be able to leave his review.
- Because Reviews Are the Gospel, Spencer attracts a bunch of equally-minded jerks who review-bomb the Eatery for equally petty motives and annihilate its reputation.
- Played for Horror:
- A Mary's Eatery waiter is a Serial Killer who targets customers who threaten bad reviews.
- Or worse, Mary's Eatery is targeted by a Serial Killer who believes locations that are not flawlessly reviewed on Yelp are better off being human slaughterhouses.
Unless you go back to Bad Review Threat, good sir, I shall leave you a 1-star rating.
