So I'm guessing a competing company bought a bunch of bad reviews at the same time. But how did the second person put it in a graph? Is he really that passionate about protecting Yankee Candle from slander, or are those review reliability things more advanced than I thought...?

[–] proper@lemmy.world 142 points 7 months ago

I’m thinking these folks had covid

[–] snapoff@sh.itjust.works 76 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This was during the omicron surge I believe

[–] VolcanoWonderpants 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Ah, I didn't look at the dates very closely, thanks for clarifying. I didn't lose my smell after having covid, but I know others did, and I'd honestly forgotten about that symptom until you mentioned it. (Edit: it was actually @SmoochyPit@beehaw.org who mentioned that. Sorry. It's been a long day ...

[–] snapoff@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 months ago

No worries man, I had just seen it before and recognized the context. I didn’t lose my sense of smell when I had covid either, but everything tasted awful. And idk if it’s related but now I get whiffs of random smells that are unlikely to be present and other people say they don’t smell, like gravel and metal. So weird.

[–] ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

No that's the two first outbreaks, it's covid 1st edition

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

So weird that they considered Covid Elf a class back then..

[–] snapoff@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

It’s all a blur in my head. I thought we were well into omicron territory by late 2021.

[–] jj122@lemmings.world 25 points 7 months ago

My guess is this is a covid spike after a holiday where many candles were purchased/gifted.

[–] SmoochyPit@beehaw.org 16 points 7 months ago

I’m not sure how or why he would’ve come across that data, but as far as competing companies go…

There definitely weren’t any widespread virus outbreaks in December 2021 and 2022 which affect the ability to smell, that’s for sure! /s

Kidding aside, maybe covid was just a really complex form of corporate sabotage between candle companies 🤔

[–] KillingAndKindess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Or maybe they had a bad batch or ran out of a particular ingredient and everyone eventually got those batches they thought they could pass off 🤷🏻‍♀️

[–] snapoff@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago

I think it’s so funny to imagine the boardroom Yankee Candle version of Mr Burns deciding to offload a bunch of crummy product during a covid surge. Ingenious

[–] key@lemmy.keychat.org 3 points 7 months ago

Or maybe Yankee candles have a baseline error rate in their manufacturing, insufficient QA, and are more commonly purchased over the holidays. The charts show absolute number of reviews and only during the post-covid period. To be semi-meaningful it should show the "no smell" reviews as a percentage of all reviews and include pre-covid years as a comparison.