It’s Time for Another Restaurant “Poll”

I just got an email from a restaurant reminding me that it was time for another one of those annual restaurant “polls” that one sees in various local periodicals and web sites. They then asked me to VOTE for them in the poll. I must get 50-100 of these “vote for me” emails during polling season. And that is why the results, when they come out, bear no resemblance to anything even remotely scientific. They should not even be called polls.

A poll is a randomly selected sample of a larger population that is designed to be able to reflect the attitudes or characteristics of that population.

These local restaurant “polls” do not even come close to doing that. The respondents are self-selecting, not random, and the results are so skewed as to be almost laughable. And they sampling process is hardly random. How you can one place any credibility in a “poll” where local restaurants exhort their customers (or people on their mail lists) to vote for that restaurant. That’s like stuffing the ballot box.

The truth of the matter is simple: The publications/web sites that conduct these polls do so mostly for sales purposes. Restaurants that win “best something” are much more likely to buy advertising so they can brag about it in the publication/web site. Now I don’t have anything against making a buck. But come on: enough with the bogus methodology and the seemingly endless categories. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone starts adding categories like “Best Doorway”, “Best Ceiling Tiles”, “Best Barstools” and “Largest Napkins!”