It is becoming all too common these days. You go out to a product or service’s website and they have a review section. I find it interesting that almost all “review” sections of someone’s site show only 4-5 star reviews these days. You will be hard pressed to find a review where someone was not satisfied and gave it a 3 star or below review. I mean…is it possible that this particular company just knocks it out of the park for every product or service they provide? No, no it’s not. All it means is that the company only publishes or “approves” the reviews where the customer gave them a stellar 5 star review.
Here is a real life example in the world of cannabis. I recently purchased some THCA flower from a very popular Youtube creator who started his own company. I will not mention the name of that company at this point (I will explain why near the end of this post), but please know this person is very successful in the world of cannabis and apparel. I watch and support his content all the time because I trust what he has to say when it comes to cannabis and related products.
So with that said, I bought an ounce of some of his THCA micros (½ oz GG#4 and ½ oz Purple Punch). I read some of the reviews before purchasing and wow, they were all stellar. Everyone commented on the quality, smell, taste etc and said these micros were “fire.” Many said that they were shocked to find these micros containing the same “punch” as higher quality flower. So for the price, I thought man this is a no brainer. I was excited to think I was going to have an ounce of flower for roughly the same price as 2 eighths from my local dispensary and still be able to enjoy it.
That excitement waned pretty quick once the ounce of micros arrived. Once I opened the bag I thought, “wow, all I see is leaves and stems down in the bag.” And once you lifted the bag to your nose, the smell was that of cut hay and maybe some other freshly mowed grasses. Not good people…not good. But I held out some hope thinking maybe it will smell better once ground and maybe just maybe the effects and taste will still come through proving why so many are giving these micros 5 stars in their review.
Well the disappointment kept coming. I spent the better part of an hour going through the bags trying to pull out all of the stems and leaves so I could see how much “bud” was actually in the ounce. Then I went ahead and ground some up and the hay smell just kept on coming. NO hints of anything you come to expect from GG#4 and Purple Punch at all. And all of the things you use to judge the quality of the smoke (color of the ash, harshness on the throat, taste etc) fell completely short. The ash burned almost black. There for sure was some harshness on the inhale. And it took several inhales before any effects could possibly be felt.
There is no way this product could receive anything higher than a 1 star review. No way. But nowhere on their site do they show anyone being this unhappy. So I thought maybe I was just given a bad bag or two and I am really an exception so I did reach back out to the company to let them know how unhappy I was. After a few emails back and forth, they agreed to replace the 2 bags with 2 brand new bags. They sent me a shipping label and paid for the return and reshipped the product back out to me at no charge. They stepped up to the plate big time in the customer service department.
So the replacement bags arrived and I was excited once again thinking the bad bags were just a one off, as they say. But nope, the 2 replacement bags had the exact same quality of micros as the first. So I was about to just write them off and choose to never buy from them again. That was until I just saw a video by the creator and owner of the company where he announced that they are pulling the micros from their product line because the quality is just not there and he cannot put his name behind it. Kudos to him for doing that and honestly it will probably cause me to buy from him again and this is why I am not putting the name of the company in this post.
But the whole point of this post is to get you to see that reviews that are published on a company’s own website are not telling the whole picture. In fact, they are quite sanitized. Had I done just a little more research before my purchase, I most likely would have seen the review vids on YouTube where some buyers also experienced the same issues with the “micros.” The review vids I did watch, post-purchase, for sure changed my mind about trying to reorder them ever again. So do some due diligence before making a purchase. And please never assume that a product with nothing but 5 star reviews is actually a 5 star product.
That is all…carry on.