The Battle for Guzman Mirrabooka - Post
Author: KlauDate: 2025/07/01
A couple of months ago, I discovered that a Guzman y Gomez was opening in the nearby suburb of Mirrabooka. I didn't think too much about it since I don't frequent one often, but I did watch its development with half-interest since it's not often you get to see a fast food store created from the ground up. It eventually opened but I passed on their $5 opening deals since I didn't deem it worth the effort.
A week or so later I decided to check out how it was going on Google and I was beyond shocked – they held a roughly 2.3-star rating, with most reviews being overwhelmingly negative. These complaints followed similar trends such as insanely long wait times, messed up orders, and a general lack of care put into the quality of the food. I was instantly hooked on watching the development of the store (primarily through its reviews), and the negative ones continued to flood in over the following weeks.
That was until one day when I checked in and saw that it's overall rating had jumped to 3.8 stars, I checked the recent reviews and they were receiving roughly 10-20 5-star reviews a day, with the majority being from newly created accounts (mostly zero to a couple reviews posted). I've gone back through the reviews from that timeframe while writing this and it appears that Google has automatically removed a portion of them which is interesting.
It's still somewhat visible, but these 5-star reviews all read almost the exact same way, following a script that all sounded eerily similar to each other – '(Employee Name) was amazing/a wonderful person, food was perfect as was the overall experience'. Now I'm not saying these reviews were automated, but I think it's most likely a case of customers being asked to write a positive review in exchange for free food. I'm sure the employees there are great people, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that most customers had such an exceptional experience that they all decided to post similarly sounding reviews.
That isn't to say the negative reviews stopped though, they continued to flow in at a lesser pace and while they raised the same issues as earlier, they sounded like unique experiences at least. As of writing this post in the middle of June, the battle between both sides looks like it's still raging on, with a slight advantage to the negative reviews somehow. It is incredibly hard to not to doubt the legitimacy of these reviews when some by profiles like this are posted in quick succession…
Finally, while I always intended to write a post similar to this, I recently read a review that effectively confirmed my belief that maybe there's something fishy going on. Perhaps I'm falling into the confirmation bias trap, but I truly do think that the [insert side or drink] was a great addition to the Guzman y Gomez menu!
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