How to Record Video of Your Employees and Get Away With It [e168]
Nasir and Matt talk about Panera Bread's decision to start recording video of its employeesand whether that decision is legal. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And welcome to another day of podcasting of business law and business news. You know, actually, I’m pretty excited about the stock market today because Yelp is crashing like crazy – not like crazy, it’s down 6 percent. But, if you look, when our episode about Yelp came out last Wednesday, I’m pretty sure we caused its collapse and its downfall. MATT: Most likely. NASIR: At least the beginning of it, most likely. That episode did pretty well. So, if you haven’t caught that, yeah, we had a guest from a company that actually was being sued by Yelp for trying to help out business owners so check that out. MATT: Revleap. NASIR: Yeah, Revleap, exactly. MATT: Yeah, I want to stay posted on that one. Interested to see what happens. A good guy, too. So, hopefully they win. Maybe they’ll win and the judgment will be that they own Yelp. That’d be cool. NASIR: And they’ll be like, “We hate Yelp!” and they’ll just close the business. Actually, yeah, Yelp is down 4 percent. It was yesterday I think another 6 percent – I think I read. But there’s also this other campaign or some documentary that’s going on that’s called the Billion Dollar Bully trailer and it’s just basically there’s a trailer about Yelp and their CEO and so forth that’s being produced, and they have a Kickstarter campaign. MATT: Actually, I had a conversation with somebody this week and, for people that don’t own a business or don’t work with businesses, they probably don’t know but we’ve talked about this many times before how Yelp’s kind of can basically control exactly what they do and then they call you if you advertise with them and you pull the advertising. They can manipulate. They can just manipulate everything and I don’t think the general public knows about this. Why would you know unless you own a business or work closely with businesses or if someone, you know, one of those people tell you about it? If you’re just in the general public like my wife is, she has no idea. She uses Yelp all the time because she doesn’t know that they completely can manipulate something and make one business look a lot better than it is or a lot more worse than it is. NASIR: Oh, yeah, and you’re absolutely correct. I mean, most people don’t know. Also, in a way, I can understand why they don’t really care because, at the end, all they care about it, okay, not just can I trust the ratings but is a good place that have five stars actually good? Because they don’t really care about the one or two stars because that’s fine. All they want is a good place to go, right? And a trusted source. So, so long as that part is trustworthy, and the likelihood is that it is, because it’s very easy to get a lower rating, difficult to get a higher rating – even with Yelp’s standards – so I could understand why, you know, the general public doesn’t care. But, I think, because it’s hitting small businesses so hard, I mean, I predicted, I mean, I think Yelp is on a bad course and I think investors are going to see that on the long-term that they’re going to have to make some adjustments pretty quickly and all this information of the practices of businesses are going to get out and general public is going to start understanding it and the impact it’s having. MATT: Yeah. Hopefully, is the documentary already out or is it coming out? NASIR: No. In fact, we should probably link the campaign. There’s a Kickstarter campaign. They’ve raised a small amount of money. It’s 50 percent done and they need the rest to so-called “finish” the other 50 percent which is understanding, I mean, there’s a lot of post-production costs that are pretty expensive.