Customer-Service Ratings Aren’t Just Useless — They’re Unfair to Workers Too

They’re loaded with bias and an insult to the human spirit

The other day I went to the Apple store to buy a power adaptor for a MacBook Air.

I made an appointment online, showed up, and an employee cheerily and promptly gave me the adaptor. We chitchatted briefly. I paid for it and left.

And then I got this email from Apple asking me to rate the employee…

(I obscured the employee’s name to protect her privacy.)

Every time I’m asked to do this, I feel like a complete bag of dirt. There’s something decidedly icky — if extremely swipe-left modern — about being asked to ponder a human being with whom you just interacted for perhaps 30 seconds, and, in a snap judgment, reduce them to a single five-point-scale.

Yet it’s become a very common and frankly blasé occurrence, right? Nearly every time we interact with a service worker these days, their company asks us to rate them. We’re asked to rate Lyft drivers, bathroom-stall cleaners, delivery folks, baristas, and the entire host of people we…