Here's a question a friend asked me over dinner: do people in different parts of the city have different
moods — and does it show up in their Google reviews?
Her thinking went like this. A McDonald's is a McDonald's. The Big Mac in Woodlands is the same Big Mac as
the one in Bedok. So if one neighbourhood gives its McDonald's four stars and another gives it three, that
gap can't really be about the food. Maybe it's about the people doing the rating. Maybe some
neighbourhoods are just… grumpier.
It's a fun idea. I spent a weekend testing it properly. Here's what I found — including one twist I genuinely
didn't see coming.
The obvious problem (and the trick that fixes it)
You can't just rank neighbourhoods by their McDonald's rating and call the low ones "unhappy." A single
outlet's rating is a mess of things that have nothing to do with mood: maybe that branch has one rude
manager, maybe it's inside a chaotic mall, maybe it gets slammed with angry delivery-app reviews. One
restaurant tells you almost nothing.
So here's the trick that makes the whole thing work: look at lots of different chains at once.
A bad McDonald's manager has nothing to do with the KFC down the road, or the Starbucks, or the Ya Kun. Those
are run by completely different people. So if a neighbourhood is harsh on McDonald's purely by bad luck, the
other chains there should look normal.
But if a neighbourhood is harsh on McDonald's and KFC and Subway and Toast Box — all at once —
then it's almost certainly not the restaurants. Something about that place, or the people reviewing in it,
is dragging everything down together. That agreement-across-chains is the fingerprint we're hunting for.
The data
I collected the Google ratings of 1,084 outlets from 10 chains across Singapore: McDonald's, KFC,
Subway, Burger King, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, Toast Box, Ya Kun, Old Chang Kee and Deli France. Every outlet
came with its star rating and its exact location, which I matched to one of Singapore's official
neighbourhoods (Bedok, Tampines, Woodlands, and so on).
Then, for each chain, I worked out how each outlet rated compared to that chain's own average. A Starbucks
sitting at 3.8 when Starbucks normally runs 4.0 counts as "half a notch grumpy," and so on. That way I'm
comparing every chain fairly against itself, not against each other.
What I found
Neighbourhoods really do differ — and they agree with each other. When a neighbourhood was tough on one
chain, it tended to be tough on the others too. The chains agreed about which areas were harsh and which
were kind, far more than you'd ever get by chance. (I shuffled the data thousands of times to be sure this
wasn't a fluke — it held up easily.)
So the basic hypothesis is real: some Singapore neighbourhoods are consistently harsher reviewers than
others, across totally unrelated restaurants.
Here's every neighbourhood, ranked. Bars to the left mean a tougher crowd (rates restaurants below the
chain's own norm); bars to the right mean a kinder crowd. The chain has been cancelled out, so what's
left is the neighbourhood's own signature:
tougher crowd ◄─────────────┼─────────────► kinder crowd
Sembawang ██████████████│ -0.23
Toa Payoh ███████████│ -0.18
Woodlands ███████████│ -0.18
Jurong East ███████████│ -0.18
Bukit Timah █████████│ -0.14
Bishan ████████│ -0.13
Novena ███████│ -0.11
Tanglin ██████│ -0.10
Clementi ██████│ -0.09
Punggol █│ -0.02
Ang Mo Kio █│ -0.01
Pasir Ris █│ -0.01
Bukit Panjang │ -0.00
Bukit Batok │█ +0.01
Queenstown │████ +0.06
Bukit Merah │████ +0.06
Yishun │█████ +0.07
Choa Chu Kang │█████ +0.07
Jurong West │██████ +0.09
Serangoon │██████ +0.10
Hougang │██████ +0.10
Geylang │███████ +0.12
Sengkang │███████ +0.12
Tampines │█████████ +0.14
Bedok │█████████ +0.14
Kallang │██████████ +0.16
Marine Parade │██████████████ +0.22
Outram │████████████████████ +0.32
Rochor │██████████████████████ +0.35
And here's the twist I didn't expect. I assumed wealthy, comfortable areas would be the generous ones.
Instead, the relationship leans the other way: posher neighbourhoods tend to be the tougher crowds.
Look near the top of the harsh list — Bukit Timah (the priciest postcode in the country), plus Bishan,
Novena and Tanglin, all well-heeled and all stingy with stars. The warmest reviews, meanwhile, come from
heartland towns like Tampines, Bedok, Sengkang and Hougang.
It isn't a perfectly clean line — Sembawang and Woodlands are tough crowds without being rich — but the
overall tilt is real, and it points against the obvious "rich = content = generous" guess. It makes sense
once you flip it: if you can afford anything, your standards are higher, and an average burger feels like a
letdown. Wealthier people aren't unhappier — they're just harder to impress. What I'd loosely called
"grumpiness" is really exactingness.
The map of Singapore's toughest and softest crowds (this barely budged no matter how I sliced the data):
- Toughest reviewers: Sembawang, Woodlands, Toa Payoh, Jurong East, Bukit Timah.
- Kindest reviewers: Rochor, Outram, Marine Parade, Kallang, Bedok.
How big a deal is this, really?
Honestly? Small. If you want to know whether a specific restaurant is good, the neighbourhood it's in barely
matters — the vast majority of why a place gets the stars it gets is the place itself: the staff, the food,
the wait. The neighbourhood "mood" is a faint background hum, not the main signal.
But it's a real hum. It's consistent, it shows up across ten unrelated brands, and it points the opposite
way from the obvious "rich = happy = generous" guess. That's worth knowing.
A few honest caveats
I want to be straight about what this is and isn't:
- Google only shows me the average star rating, not the full breakdown, so this is a slightly blurry measurement.
- Reviews pile up over years, so this is a long-run reputation, not today's mood.
- Tourist-heavy and transport-hub spots get reviewed by people who don't live there, which muddies things.
- And most importantly: this shows neighbourhoods rate identical restaurants differently. Calling that "happiness" is a leap. "How easily impressed people are" is the safer reading.
So, is your neighbourhood grumpy?
A little, maybe — but probably not in the way you'd think. Singapore's neighbourhoods do have a measurable
reviewing personality, and the wealthier ones are the toughest critics, not the happiest customers. Money
doesn't buy generosity in the reviews section. It buys higher expectations.
Next time your favourite spot has a rating you think is unfair, check the postcode. It might just be a tough
crowd.
How it was done, for the curious: I gathered the public Google Maps ratings and locations of 1,084
chain outlets, matched each to its neighbourhood, compared every outlet to its own chain's average, and
tested whether different chains agreed about which neighbourhoods were harsh — using reshuffling tests to rule
out coincidence. Built in Python. Findings are exploratory, not a formal study. A couple of background ideas
here — that higher expectations lead to tougher reviews, and that online ratings tend to clump at the
extremes — come from consumer-research work by Oliver (1980) and Hu, Pavlou & Zhang (2009).