George Washington’s Trusted Tavern Guide: The Birth of the User Review

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0:36Pushkin. Too quick? No, it was perfect. Pushkit, stop. You got it. Hey, Malcolm Glaube here. This special episode of Business History is part of a larger series exploring trust. We're understanding where it comes from, the moment it's earned, and where we decide to place it. This episode is sponsored by PayPal Open, trusted by consumers built for all business. Wherever commerce moves next, you can rest assured PayPal Open has your back. And with that, Jacob and Robert are taking a deep dive into the history of consumer reviews and how they impact who and what we decide to trust. Five out of five stars from me.

1:30Robert, Robert, Robert. Oh, if you say it three times, it sounds weird. Robert Smith, I'm going to read you two user reviews. Okay. They're of the same thing, and I want you to tell me what they are reviews of. Got it. First one, five stars. Headline, best business history podcast. Wait, don't answer it yet. I know this one. Second review, four stars from username PitterPatter208. Headline, love the pod, just one thing. The review says, I'm a new listener and I love the podcast and the hosts. So far, so good. Please, please, please stop saying right after every other sentence. The show is business history, right?

2:14Yes, it is. That is right. And I am sorry, PitterPatter208. We're working on it. Honestly, we are working on it. And thank you, PitterPatter208, for rating and reviewing the show. Truly, truly. There is a reason that we and other podcasters are always asking listeners to rate and review the show. And it's not because we are needy and insecure. A little bit. We're not not needy and insecure. But also, more importantly, in the 21st century, user reviews are not just, as they say in business, a nice to have. They are a need to have, a must have. because in the peer-to-peer world that we live in today, reviews taken together aggregate information.

2:58They tell us what's reliable and what is not reliable. You know, when we're deciding whether to take an Uber or a Lyft or to rent a place on Airbnb or VRBO or buy something on Amazon or eBay, the review helps us solve the essential problem of commerce, the problem of trust. If I were reviewing the review as a concept, as a theme in the history of business, I would give it five stars. Ten of ten would review again. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business History, a show about the history of business. Today on the show, an ode, an encomium, an homage to the user review. The secret hero of 21st century business.

3:43Come, Robert, for the copper merchant who provided such bad customer service that we're still talking about it thousands of years later. And stay for George Washington's reviews of the taverns of early America. Before there was the user review, there was the customer complaint. So we are going to start with the first customer complaint in the history of the world, or at least the first one that we know of. It is roughly 3 ,775 years old. Which is amazing. Coins themselves are what, 3 ,000 years old? They're about 2 ,600 years old. So 1 ,000 years before coins, people are complaining. This complaint we know about because it was carved in cuneiform into a clay tablet.

4:33I mean, I say clay tablet because people always say clay tablet. But as I was studying this one, I realized it's only like five inches by two inches, quite small. So it's not the Ten Commandments. It's not the Ten Commandments. It's more like a clay postcard. And it was, in fact, used as a postcard to send a message. I saw this little tablet in the British Museum. It's not even featured prominently. It's down a little bit on the shelf. And the label is amazingly understated. The label on this tablet says, complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper. It's not wrong. It's not wrong. But it undersells it.

5:08I think it undersells it. The delight of it. So this tablet-slash-postcard was discovered in modern-day Iraq in what was Mesopotamia 3 ,700 years ago. And it was found in what seems to have been the house of a merchant named Ea Nazir in the city of Ur. And we know he was a copper merchant, and we think it was his house because all these clay postcards addressed to him were excavated from this house. He was a hoarder. He kept them all. Apparently, apparently. And so the complaint we're talking about is one of these postcards from a customer named Nani. And Nani trusted Eonatzeer to supply the copper as promised.

5:50And then Nani sent a messenger to pick up the copper. But the deal did not go down the way it was supposed to go down. And so Nani sent this clay complaint to Eonatzeer. Robert, give us a hit. I'm so excited for this. You did not do what you promised me. You put ingots, which were not good, before my messenger and said, if you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away. What do you take me for that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? What do you take me for? Who do you think I am? None is not done. None is not done. It's a tiny little postcard, but he seems to fit a lot of cuneiform on there.

6:31He's really working the clay on this one with anger. Next move, ask for a refund. Go ahead. I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money deposited with you. But you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times. And that through enemy territory. Yeah, bad news for Nani. The money-back guarantee is not going to be invented for more than 3 ,000 years. Anyway, give us the conclusion of this, the oldest complaint that we know of in history. I shall from now on select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.

7:16One of the really interesting things about this story is this was not the only complaint excavated from Eonat Sear's house. There's this whole trove. Some reason you got to call it a trove. Trove of tablets. Trove of tablets. tablets. There's a letter from one of his partners trying to get him to just like be decent to customers. Basically starts, come on, man, act in such a way that Eden Sin will not become angry. Come on, man. There's another one from a disgruntled customer that really speaks to me. I could do this all day. It sums up a lot in just a few words. So it's customer and he writes to E.N.

7:52Atzer. Do you not know how tired I am? Do you not know how tired I am? This is the cry from the heart of everyone who will get stuck in a customer service doom loop for the next 3 ,700 years. There is a bigger idea here. The economist George Akilov wrote about it in this famous paper called The Market for Lemons. It was not about fruit. It was about used cars, which used to be called lemons if, you know, the wheel would fall off or the engine wouldn't work. And the paper basically won them a Nobel Prize. and what it's about is we think about markets as working well in our economy, which they do, but they only work well if everybody knows the same thing.

8:39This paper was about asymmetric information. When one person knows more than the other person, then it makes it hard for a market to truly work efficiently. And oftentimes the seller knows more than the buyer. Like in a used car, you don't know if it's been in a wreck or copper ingots. You don't know the quality of ingots because you have to go through enemy territory just to look at them. And Akilov makes a particular prediction. If you are buying a used car, you will rationally assume that it's a lemon. You will offer less money than you otherwise would have because you don't know if you're going to have to fix it.

9:13And this ends up being bad for everyone. It's bad for me because I don't know the car I'm going to get, but it's bad for someone who's selling a good car, who wants to sell a good car at a fair price, and everyone just assumes it's a lemon, assumes it's bad. And the market breaks down a little bit. It's not as efficient as it could be. It's painful. It's painful for all of us to live in this world where we don't know what's good, we assume it's bad, we think we're going to get cheated. And I feel like that's part of the reason the A.I. Natsir, you know, 3 ,700-year-old customer complaint is so delightful, frankly, so resonant.

9:50There is this incredible sort of modern life that this ancient tablet postcard, this first customer complaint has had. And as far as I can tell, it started in 2015 when somebody took a picture of this tablet in the British Museum, the same thing you saw, and they posted it on Reddit with the caption 1750 BC problems. And even today, I was looking as I was putting together this story, there is this subreddit that is still quite active. People post to it all the time. devoted entirely to A.N. Natsir and his poor quality ingots. Just in the last month or so, a guy posted a picture of himself in the British Museum standing in front of the case where the tablet's supposed to be, but there's a sign that says the tablet is out on loan, which is kind of perfect, right?

10:42Like, now you can complain about the complaint being not there. There's something great about it. And anyway, the guy in the picture is making a thumbs-down sign, Huge smile on his face, clearly very pleased with the whole situation. And he's wearing a T-shirt that says, Aya Nutsir's fine quality copper ingots, established 1750 B.C. So I am a member of this subreddit and have been since long before we started this show. And I don't know why it's so delightful. It is fun to imagine Aya Nutsir as a cartoon villain swimming in a bathtub full of complaints like Scrooge McDuck swims in gold coins. Just delighting reading all of the messages from the customers he screwed over.

11:33There is a simple problem that is revealed by this story, and it's a problem that we are going to spend the rest of the show talking about how people have tried to solve. When you buy something, for example, some copper ingots, how do you know if you're buying from a merchant who's going to give you what you need or from somebody who's going to provide you with poor quality ingots? Is the person going to be nice to you, or are they going to send your messenger back empty-handed through enemy territory? And the problem for buyers in Mesopotamia was the customer complaints were going only to Eonatzeer.

12:12So Eonatzeer knew his customers were not happy. And he was hoarding them. I mean, if they had somehow been posted on a wall or something. Yes, yes. This is the difference between a customer complaint and a customer review. The review is out there for everybody to see. And without reviews, other potential customers don't know what they are getting into. And of course, of course, interestingly, but of course, the other potential customers knew that they didn't know. They were operating in this world that was a low trust world. It was a low trust equilibrium. And so in this kind of world where you know that you don't know, you have to spend a lot of energy trying to figure out if the person you're doing business with is going to do what they say.

12:59And this is not an ideal world. Nani just wants to make his copper whatever, bracelets. He doesn't have to deal with this stuff. He just wants to buy the copper. He's got the money. He wants to spend the money. He just wants to get high-quality ingots and have his messenger treated with respect. Now, it is worth noting that most business for all of history is not this kind of long distance, high value, maybe one off exchange. Mostly what people buy is bread from the bakery down the street. The kind of thing that you buy every day, every week, again and again. And this is quite a different kind of transaction.

13:40You know, if you buy a stale loaf of bread, you're not going to go back to that baker again and you're going to tell everyone in the village. You're going to go to a different baker. Yeah, it's a repeated game. It is, in fact, not in the narrow self-interest of the baker to give you old bread because it's bad for business. When you look more broadly at the history of the ancient world, you do also see systems start to develop over long-distance commerce, over commerce that is not necessarily a repeated game. More recently, we talked about A &P in our story about grocery stores and about how they developed store brands as a way of ensuring quality.

14:20They are one of the early modern examples of store brands. But brands themselves go back a very long way. Not as far as we know to Ea Natsir, but you can find something brand-like in the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire, you see amphora. You know amphora, those clay vessels? You see amphora with writing on them. And the writing doesn't just say what's inside. It says where the product comes from. There's one example from around 70 A.D. that I particularly like. It says on the side, Lucius Tetius Africanus. That's the name of the guy who distributed it. Finest fish sauce from Antipolis. Finest.

15:06Antipolis. I think that's how you say it. I don't know. Is Antibes today in the south of France. And this vessel was actually excavated in London. So hundreds of miles away. So it was fancy imported fish sauce. The finest. Wait, that's what it says on the label. We don't know what was inside, but yes, yes, it says it's the finest. And presumably you get your Lucius Tetius Africanus fish sauce, and if you like it, you keep buying it. It's a brand. You know it's the finest, or at least you know you like it. So this is a version of people figuring out ways to solve the trust problem. But again, fish sauce is something maybe you buy every week or every month.

15:51It is still a repeated game. There is one aspect of commerce where this trust problem proves particularly hard to solve because it is kind of inherently a one-time game or tends more to be a one-time game. And as the world becomes more globalized, it becomes more of an acute problem. After the break, we're going to talk about how the user review was invented to solve the trust problem in travel.

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17:33I would say the classic time to get fleeced in the modern world is when you are traveling. Whole family gets off a plane. You haven't slept in 24 hours. And somebody's like, we got a good restaurant here. Yes, it is a problem. And it has been a problem forever. And so we're going to jump forward thousands of years and we're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about how profound the problem of trust was for travelers, even if you were the president of the United States of America. And then we'll talk about how the power of the user review solved the problem or at least helped to solve the problem.

18:13Let's do it. The president we're going to talk about is not just any president. It's the big man, the general, the pride of Mount Vernon, number one. George Washington. He's going to do something nobody would have wanted to do if they didn't kind of have to, which was go on a tour of all 13 states of America. Hard to do at first. In the late 1700s. And because he was a president and not a king, a man of the people, he decided that he was not going to stay in the fancy estates of his rich friends. He was going to stay where the people stay, in public houses. And public houses were more or less what they sound like.

18:49There were houses that were open to the public. This is, in fact, part of the regulatory regime at the time. The deal was, if you wanted to sell alcohol to the public, essentially a bar, you had to pay a fee to the government and get a license and rent out rooms in your house. So that no one's trying to ride their horse home drunk. And as you probably know, this is where pub comes from. Pub as in public. As George Washington found out on his tour of America, a lot of public houses were terrible places to stay. And we know this because he kept a diary, hopefully. At one point in his travels, he was in North Carolina.

19:27It was raining. He wanted to find a place to sleep. So he went and looked in at the public house. Robert Smith, give us the report from his diary. Ooh, I got to do George Washington now. No rooms or beds which appeared tolerable and everything else having a dirty appearance, I was compelled to keep on. Okay, but how about Georgia? How was Georgia? The accommodations on the whole road to Savannah we found extremely indifferent, the houses being small and badly provided either for man or horse. Not good enough for my horse. Not even a horse should sleep here. It could have been worse. It could have been worse.

20:08There is this great story from the Revolution, from during the time of the Revolutionary War, when John Adams and Ben Franklin stayed in a public house where they had to share a bed, which was apparently common, normal at the time. Sometimes you would check in, get in bed, fall asleep, and then a few hours later, some stranger would just climb into bed with you. Apparently, Adams and Franklin were laying there in their bed arguing over whether it was healthier to sleep with the window open or closed. and kind of perfectly, Franklin starts lecturing Adams about why open is better. He loves the fresh air.

20:46Loves the fresh air. And Adams just falls asleep with Franklin talking, which you could imagine Franklin would never stop talking. I love Ben Franklin. Worst roommate ever. The whole thing about staying in a public house was essentially a shot in the dark. You roll into a strange town. You try and figure out if there is a public house, where there is a public house. No idea if it's going to be a nice place for man or horse or not, or if you can trust the proprietor or if he's going to rip you off. You just don't know. We should say, in defense of American hospitality circa 1790, George Washington did find some nice places on his trip.

21:27He was apparently so impressed with Mr. Brown's fine tavern in New Haven that he paid for the mayor, the governor, and the lieutenant governor all to join him there for dinner. But he can't tell the world. He can't leave five stars on Mr. Brown's website. Sure, George Washington slept here. But did he like it? This is the problem. This is the problem. It applies to good businesses as well as bad. Customers know, but they can't tell the world. And over time, travel expands. In the 1800s, railroads come along and travel starts to become open to more of the public. And that is when the world finds its first solution to this problem, the guidebook, the travel guidebook.

22:07the thing you can buy and carry along with you on your travels, which I would argue is the first user review. This is the first time someone has broadcast to the world, here's what I think about places good and bad. Here's my advice. And this is one of those simultaneous invention stories that we've talked about, the kind of thing where lots of people have the same idea around the same time. You see guidebooks in the first half of the 1800s popping up in the U.S., in the U.K. and Europe. But there is one guy who does it best, becomes the biggest and most famous guidebook writer. His name is Karl Baedeker.

22:46German. German. His family was in the publishing business, and they ran a bookstore. And he actually saw British tourists coming into the bookstore with their guidebooks. A lot of them were basically just lists, you know. Here's 100 hotels. Which, you know, that's better than nothing. But Baedeker decides he's going to get into the guidebook game, and he personally is going to go everywhere. He's going to walk every path, check out every hotel, so that when you are reading a Baedeker guidebook, what you are reading is what he saw. And I admire his commitment to his bit. In one of his early guidebooks, he describes a trip between two towns, and what he says is, the writer of these lines made the trip at night and regrets that he can report nothing about it.

23:36Honest. Honest. And like when somebody tells me they don't know, I trust them more. Because then when they're telling me what they do know, I'm like, oh, well, I presume they do know. Bedeker starts writing these guidebooks. They're very popular. They become a multi-generational thing where his sons get into the business. And they really are user reviews. They really are telling you what they liked and also what they did not like. Give us a little hit of the Baedeker description of Marseille in the south of France. The atmosphere of the town in summer is hot and oppressive. You got that right.

24:09Those, therefore, who contemplate a sojourn of several days during the warm season are recommended to select the Hotel des Catalans. And there's a little star next to it. In the immediate vicinity of the sea bass, the situation is delightful and the house spacious and comfortable. That little asterisk that you mentioned next to the hotel's name is, in fact, Baedeker's official recommendation. We're not in the one-star, two-star, four-star, six-star, whatever world yet. Star inflation. Star inflation has not yet taken off. One star is good. On very rare occasions, he'll do two stars, typically for a site and not a hotel.

24:47Like the Parthenon, yes. The absolute must-see. Well, here, let's do one. And so the collection of ancient frescoes in the Museo Nazionale in Naples gets two stars. These works are almost the only specimens of ancient painting which have come down to us and are therefore of extreme value. Many of them are beautifully conceived and executed with an easy, masterly touch. Compelling. Two stars. Two stars. It's Naples. So these are from, you know, Pompeii and Herculaneum. I'm literally going. I have not. I have wanted to go to that. Now I want to go, yeah. So Baedeker tells you what's great, what, you know, the must-sees.

25:25But honestly, and this goes back to Annette's here, my favorite parts, and it seems like Baedeker's favorite part, is when they are advising travelers what not to do, how not to get ripped off. Like, there's this one detail from the Entryano Hotel in Cusie in Tuscany. The landlord offers Etruscan relics for sale at exorbitant prices. Travelers are cautioned against making purchases of this description. where the manufacture of spurious antiquities is greatly in vogue. Don't buy them. Ebedeker also sort of goes beyond reviews of specific places to kind of take the vulnerable traveler under his wing, you know, to protect you from the scoundrels out on the road.

26:08Like, for example, always get a written itemized bill. A waiter's arithmetic is faulty, and the faults are seldom found to be in the favor of the traveler. Funny how that works. Yeah, weird. Another one for when you're checking out of the hotel. A habit too often prevails of presenting the bill at the last moment when mistakes must be submitted to for want of time to investigate them. And then he says, if you're going to check out early in the morning, you will do well to ask for your bills on the previous evening. Good advice. The books become wildly popular. They're translated into French and into English.

26:44The word Baedeker becomes synonymous with travel guide for a while. And along with this popularity comes a really interesting shift in the power dynamic between buyers and sellers in the travel industry. And you can really see it in one story in particular. It happens when a hotel owner sues Baedeker because he doesn't like what the guidebook says about his hotel. And in fact, the owner wins. And in the next edition, Baedeker doesn't list the guy's hotel at all. He's like, you don't like it? Okay, I'll just take you out. Leave me alone. And not long after that, the guy's hotel goes out of business.