The popular 14-inch wok (center) at the Wok Shop, a 57-year-old store in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Francisco. Photographer: Jason Henry for Bloomberg Businessweek
The modern internet has ushered in a world of near-infinite consumer choice, training a generation of online shoppers to expect low prices, rapid shipping, forgiving return policies and responsive customer service. Since deciding among a vast array of products you can’t see in person and hold in your hands is hard, the internet has also given rise to a series of online recommendation sites. Wirecutter, which the New York Times bought for $30 million in 2016, is the undisputed king of these, promising to identify whatever flatscreen television or citrus juicer is the superlative offering, then giving readers a single link to click through. The company with the best product gets a bump in sales, the site takes a commission, and customers get the world’s best drip coffee maker or under-desk treadmill, or whatever, shipped to their house within 48 hours. Everyone wins.
But Wirecutter’s endorsement can also be a curse. It’s natural that customers who learn that there is one perfect product are loath to settle for an alternative, and the level of demand that a platform like the New York Times can direct at a business may be overwhelming. Not everyone selling something online is ready for—or even interested in—internet-scale success.
Take the tale of the best wok in e-commerce, according to Wirecutter. It started in 2017 when, on a friend’s recommendation, Cathy Erway visited a small store called the Wok Shop on a trip to San Francisco. She chatted with the shop’s owner, Tane Chan, who patiently explained how to season and care for woks. The carbon steel pan that Erway ended up buying was light yet solidly built, came with a detachable wooden handle and cost about $40, less than competing products. Erway walked out of the store with her new wok wrapped in newspaper and began using it for her own home cooking.
Tane Chan, owner of the Wok Shop, reviews orders on the store computer on March 25. Photographer: Jason Henry for Bloomberg Businessweek
Several years later, Wirecutter commissioned Erway to review woks and, per the website’s standard routine, choose a single product to serve as the platonic ideal of the category. She tried out 14 different woks, putting them to the test by stir-frying, deep-frying, boiling and steaming. But she kept returning to the one she’d bought from the Wok Shop. “It checked off all the boxes for me: the structure, the handle and design. It was comfortable, light enough,” she says. “For me, it was my top pick.” Her review for Wirecutter appeared on Jan. 5, 2023, declaring that the Wok Shop’s pan “outperformed the others in pretty much every way.”
Wirecutter is not the Wok Shop’s only brush with prominence—the store has also been recognized by America’s Test Kitchen, New York magazine, the foodie website Serious Eats and multiple cookbook writers. But the deluge of orders led to headaches for both Chan, who wasn’t shipping out pans from Amazon-esque fulfillment centers, and her new customers, who were used to the almost magical experience of online shopping. One-star reviews cropped up on Google reviews and Yelp, with some customers saying they’d waited two to three months without receiving a confirmation email or shipping notification.
Many customers described how a phone rang endlessly when they called to check on their purchases, since there was no answering machine. Or, perhaps worse, Chan answered. One reviewer wrote that the owner said to her, “You are going to tell me how to run my business? I already canceled your order, go buy your wok somewhere else.” Others said Chan told them that they were not her only customer, not “a gentleman,” or simply “not a priority.” One reviewer recounted asking about a warranty. Chan’s response, according to the review: “You are buying a wok, not a diamond! It is a stupid question!”
Chan outside her store. Photographer: Jason Henry for Bloomberg Businessweek
When I called the Wok Shop myself, an employee picked up after two rings. Chan, now 86, laughed when I read the reviews to her. “OK, maybe I do get a little sarcastic if a customer is questioning us, if they don’t trust us,” she told me. “But you know it works both ways.” Chan, a college-educated daughter of immigrants who grew up in New Mexico, said she was offended by some customers who seemed surprised she could speak fluent English and expressed wariness about products she sold that were made in China. (Her famous wok is made in the US.) She says business is thriving. “I don’t know if the uptick is from Wirecutter,” she says. “I’m sure it helped us. You can’t deny that. I’m positive it helped.”
Erway says she wasn’t aware of the friction building between Chan and her customers. She recalls that her editor twice reached out to her about slow shipping speed in the months that followed publication. The glut of negative reviews, her editor told her, indicated that the Wok Shop had come down with a case of “Wirecutter Effect,” the phenomenon of a positive review overwhelming a merchant with new demand.
Jason Chen, Wirecutter’s editorial director, says the company talks to merchants before featuring them to warn them about the additional demand—the confectioners it features in its annual boxed chocolate guide, he says, are particularly prone to running through their entire supply. He says the Wok Shop assured Wirecutter in advance that it could handle the volume. The site eventually decided to name a new top wok. “When things change, things change,” says Chen. “It’s a big responsibility.” (Serious Eats also removed the Wok Shop’s product from its top picks.)
Erway still swears by her choice. But someone reading the new review might question whether there really is some magical distinction between the internet’s best wok and the second-best. The new Wirecutter review says that its new choice “performed nearly identically to our previous top pick from The Wok Shop.” At the moment, though, the carbon steel wok from Sur La Table doesn't perform any better than its predecessor on one key metric: It’s sold out online.