I'm no businessman, but you should probably risk the hit and get rid of that latino chick. She might cost you people, if she hasn'talready. If new people or casual customers see you flustered with her, they might avoid you in the future because they don't know that history. Your regulars might get annoyed because you're dealing withherand not taking care ofthem.
I'm not sure how things work on Yelp, but can't you dispute it? Also, can you respond to feedback?
We can help too, even if it looks weird that we're posting from some odd location, there's bound to be dudes from the board that can neg her review and post their own. I'm sure guys from the store's area are here too that can back you up. You've provided us with a thread to read, the least we can do is lend you a hand with that.
You can reply to a yelp rating, but it doesn't change the rating and people are fickle. There is no down voting on yelp, you could praise the review. But in reality someone can post that I grind up puppy mill dogs and turn them into fish food and feed them to the fish, and it'll be there for everyone to see forever. Unless I can prove that it was a competitor that posted it and have a lawyer serve yelp with a letter and go to court to contest it.
The best way to fight a bad yelp review is to get more good ones to push it further down the list. However good reviews are hard to get to "stick" as you have to have an active yelp account and be posting for months-years for good reviews to stick. They have an algorithm basically that a bad review almost always shows, and good reviews get filtered heavily to stop fake accounts etc. If you advertise with them, the algorithm changes the other way around, more good reviews will show than bad.
I have like 40 legit reviews. 38 5 star, and 2 1 star. 18 total reviews show to the public. 16 5 star, and the 2 1 star reviews. Here are the examples of bad reviews:
"Nice place. Healthy fish. Beautiful plants. RUDE salesperson. He acted like I had completely interrupted his morning. He was BEYOND unkind and unhelpful. I was flabbergasted at his behavior. Will NEVER go back." This was my employee who is a manager. I watched the video of the incident to confirm. Lady storms out of the store after we keep telling her the truth about which fish aren't going to live in her 5 gallon unheated aquarium. This is a case of can't make everyone happy. If we sell that customer the wrong thing to that 5 gallon aquarium, our other customers in the store would be disappointed.
I offered them a $100 gift card to the store, to try another chance at the store, but they're not interested. The reality is that there is a huge section of pet people who are very sensitive. They are so involved with pets because they have a hard time dealing with people.
Another big problem is people think they know best. An example from yesterday.
A customer walks in and says I hear you don't have a live fish guarantee. I reply and say that is correct, but whats up? Something not going right? She says well I bought 4 guppies from you last week and all have died all the other fish I bought at other stores are still alive. I then ask, oh what other fish? 3 Feeder goldfish, A pea Puffer, some other Guppies, and some Platies. I explain that basically goldfish shouldn't be mixed with the others, especially feeders as they carry a lot of disease. The pea puffer could get nippy on the guppies etc. That the guppies and platies need hard water which we don't have from our tap. Then I find out the tank was setup the day she bought all the fish. She has no way to test the water at all and I encouraged her to return with a water sample so we could test. Knowing that what killed these fish is most likely an uncycled tank.
After all of that, I refund the money for the fish even though it's clearly not our fault and the tank is gonna lose everything if she doesn't start taking charge of the thing. But the logic of people is, only your fish died! It can't possibly be my setup. Or even better, I've done it before so it'll work! Never mind that the last goldfish she had lived for almost a year before it died instead of 30+ years like it should have. And didn't reach a foot long in a year like it should have.
Most people realize you shouldn't keep a dog in a closet for it's whole life as that'd be cruel. Not so with fish tanks. And not only that, they want to keep a Dog, Cat, hamster and a snake all in the same closet. It's the same as fish you can't just mix them all. But they all live in the water mentality is that is stuck for a lot of people.