After purportedly stopping in at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach resort, not long ago, a visitor went straight to Google’s online review site to complain about the restaurant ambience.

“Very loud and distracting dinner atmosphere,” the visitor noted. “I just wanted a quiet peaceful meal, but White House staff and diplomats at the next table kept shouting out classified information.”

People who dislike Trump politically have found a new way of venting their fury and in the process perhaps hitting him in his wallet: They can leave a lousy review on sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google.

Of course there are also plenty of pro-Trump reviews from Trump fans. But since Trump’s nomination at the Republican convention last summer, negative reviews on Yelp and Google have begun outpacing positive reviews by a factor of 6 to 4, says Signpost, a marketing software company.

Some of the reviews are funny; others, just nasty.

“Not a pleasant experience,” noted one person about the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York. “I felt like I was going to be groped the whole time.”

“The person who runs these hotels is a giant racist which is pretty ironic for someone who is Orange-American. Would not recommend,” said another.

It’s not just that some of the reviews are snarky. More and more users have also been giving Trump’s U.S. hotels and restaurants one-star ratings, Signpost says.

“In February, in particular, we saw a spike in one-star reviews. There were about 160 one-star reviews written for Trump properties in the month of February alone,” noted Stuart Wall, Signpost’s founder and CEO.

For the Trump Organization, which didn’t return requests for comment for this story, that’s a potential cause for concern.

People who don’t even read reviews nevertheless may rely heavily on ratings systems to choose hotels and restaurants, research suggests. In fact, many people shopping for hotels begin by looking at the highest-ranked properties, which puts those farther down the list at a disadvantage.

Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca studied the impact of a Yelp ratings downgrade on restaurants in Seattle between January 2003 and October 2009.

“For independent restaurants, Yelp ratings matter a lot,” he concluded. “A one-star increase maps to about a 5 [to] 9 percent increase in sales.” He cautions that the impact is not as strong for chain restaurants and for well-known brand names, which certainly includes Trump.

For its part, Yelp tries to protect the integrity of its content by using humans to weed out politically tinged reviews.

For example, a banner is now posted on the page for Trump SoHo New York warning, “This business is being monitored by Yelp’s support team for content related to media reports.”

The site also uses software that “takes a whole number of factors into account as to whether we should trust or rely on that content, based on how much we know about that user,” says Vincent Sollitto, Yelp senior vice president.

But not all review sites use such software and even if they do, no program can screen out all politically motivated content.

Still, all is hardly lost for the Trump Organization, Luca says.

He notes that the company has talked about building more properties in the U.S. and abroad, and recently doubled the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee. That suggests that for Trump, the benefits of being president still outweigh the disadvantages.

“It seems that at least Trump thinks that the benefits of the brand-building of being president [have] a bigger effect than any negative effect that might be coming through an influx of negative reviews,” he says.

Business reporter Adam Davidson spent months investigating the Trump Hotel Baku deal, which the Trump Organization cut its ties with a month after Trump’s election. In his detailed story for The New Yorker, Davidson writes that Trump did business with corrupt partners who also did business with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. This would be in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The Trump Organization’s overseas properties have raised questions about conflicts of interest. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Adam Davidson writes about one that he calls Donald Trump’s worst deal.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

It’s a hotel in Azerbaijan, one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And the deal links a chain of people from Ivanka Trump to shady officials in Azerbaijan and possibly to members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which has been accused of sponsoring terrorism.

SHAPIRO: The property is in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. New Yorker writer Adam Davidson went to visit.

ADAM DAVIDSON: There’s about a 2-mile-by-half-a-mile stretch along the Caspian Sea that’s about as luxurious as any city in the world, just the most beautiful shops and hotels. There’s luxury restaurants, etc.

SHAPIRO: But that’s not the site of the Trump property.

DAVIDSON: There’s this neighborhood quite far away that’s more like strip malls and kind of down-on-your-luck hookah bars, and that is where that luxury Trump Hotel and residence was supposed to be.

SHAPIRO: The hotel has never opened, but the name at the top is still there, Trump. The Trump Organization says that branding was the only involvement they had. In other words, they were just a licensor. Adam Davidson of The New Yorker says that’s not entirely accurate.

DAVIDSON: They were intimately involved in this building. They had a profit share. They weren’t owners, but Trump staff were flying over for quite a while every month to oversee every aspect of the building…

SHAPIRO: Including Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

DAVIDSON: Ivanka, she went once, but from New York, I’m told she was involved in every decision. She was – she was intimately involved. And that’s really important for legal reasons that they were so involved.

SHAPIRO: This Azerbaijani official you write about who is at the center of this project, Ziya Mammadov, seems like a shady character. What did you learn about him?

DAVIDSON: So Ziya Mammadov is the transportation – was, until a couple of weeks ago, the transportation minister of Azerbaijan. And he’s been called by American officials notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan.

He is a man whose salary was something around $12,000 a year, yet he became a billionaire with the most ridiculous, luxurious homes. There’s a bunch of companies – one is technically owned by his son; the other is technically owned by his brother; another is technically owned by his former driver – but everyone believes are front companies for Ziya Mammadov, this very corrupt official. And it was this group of companies that the Trump Organization signed their deal with.

SHAPIRO: And then what is Mammadov’s possible connection to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard?

DAVIDSON: We believe, American officials believe, that Ziya Mammadov has a close business relationship with a company called Azarpassillo. And the more I learned about Azarpassillo, the clearer it seemed to be that they are likely a front company for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Many believe – the president himself has made it clear he believes – that the Revolutionary Guard funds terrorism around the world and does a lot of other nefarious things through front companies, front companies that technically have no relationship but work for the Revolutionary Guard.

SHAPIRO: So you’ve got this thread from the Trumps to the Azerbaijanis to the Iranians. And the question is, did the Trump Organization break a law? And it boils down to something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which basically prohibits American companies from doing business with corrupt officials overseas. You talked to a lot of lawyers who said even a passing glance at this deal would have raised a lot of red flags. What evidence is there that the Trump Organization may have violated this law?

DAVIDSON: The way these rules work is you need to follow red flags. So if you are buying some office furniture from Norway, you probably don’t see a lot of red flags. You’re not too worried. But once you are doing business in Azerbaijan at all, because it’s such a corrupt country, that’s a red flag. When you’re doing business with a government official of any country, that’s a red flag. When you’re doing business with a government official who is known to be perhaps the most corrupt man in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, that’s considered a huge red flag.

SHAPIRO: Adam, we should note that the Trump Organization canceled this deal after the election in December.

DAVIDSON: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: This law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, is clearest when an American bribes a foreign official. And the Trump Organization told you the money is going the other way, that they’re actually profiting from this. So what could actually be illegal here?

DAVIDSON: So this is actually a debate. I’d say nearly every expert in the FCPA said it’s very possible there was a violation here. But several said it would be tricky to prove it because you would need to show that the Trump Organization profited through the corruption that they enabled through giving something of value to a foreign corrupt official.

That’s a mouthful. But the Trump Organization’s assertion is, hey, we didn’t give them anything of value. It doesn’t have to be money, just anything of value. And they gave their name, their reputation, their brand value. And as we know, the president values his – the brand value of his name very highly. And – and that put a sheen, a kind of American-safe sheen to an otherwise corrupt operation.

SHAPIRO: So it sounds like a tough case.

DAVIDSON: I think it’s a very tough case. And, you know, the Department of Justice tends to like home runs. They like – they tend to like 100 percent cases, 98 percent cases. They don’t like tough cases. But I think when it’s the president of the United States, it’s very different than if it’s a case against, you know, just some generic real estate developer.

And we, the American people, need to know, is our president in business with really shady people? Do really shady people have information about him? That’s a different kind of need than the decision-making process that normally goes into one of these prosecutions.

SHAPIRO: Adam Davidson’s article in The New Yorker is called “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.” Great to talk to you, Adam.

DAVIDSON: Ari, such a pleasure.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

There’s hype surrounding Nintendo’s first home-to-handheld hybrid console, Switch. Wall Street Journal technology reporter Nathan Olivarez-Giles says this could be a make or break moment for Nintendo.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Moving on to technology…

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SUPER MARIO THEME”)

MARTIN: “Super Mario” and “The Legend Of Zelda” are all part of the Nintendo legacy. But now, beloved games from 30 years ago are getting a facelift to compete against Xbox and PlayStation, not to mention the hundreds of mobile apps that have frankly put Nintendo a bit on the back foot.

Nintendo has unveiled what many game reviewers are calling a game-changer. It’s called Switch, but let’s see if the Nintendo Switch is worth all the hype. To find out more about it, we called Wall Street Journal technology reporter Nathan Olivarez-Giles. He’s with us now from San Francisco. Nathan, thanks so much for joining us.

NATHAN OLIVAREZ-GILES: Yeah. My pleasure.

MARTIN: So why is this Switch such a big deal?

OLIVAREZ-GILES: Well, the Switch is the first home console to really balance being a system that you can play on your television in high definition, but then something you can take on the road with you as well. The Switch also reintroduces motion-sensing controllers that were made popular by the Wii, Nintendo’s last big hit in a new way. And they’re smaller, they’re lighter, they’re untethered. And it’s a bit of a nostalgia play, but it also really looks towards the future with a console unlike anything we’ve seen before.

MARTIN: How much does it cost?

OLIVAREZ-GILES: Just the console itself costs $299, and what you get is the tablet with its 6.2-inch touch screen. You get the two joy-con motion controllers which allow you to play with a friend easily. But if you slide them onto either side of the tablet, it creates one solid on-the-go console. And then you get a dock that you put the tablet into when you want to play on a television set. So that’s a pretty fair price. And that’s what videogame systems are going for these days.

MARTIN: So you’ve played it. What do you think?

OLIVAREZ-GILES: Well, at this point, the hardware is the best that Nintendo has ever made. And I’ve had a total blast playing it. The standout game for me was “The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild.” If you’re a “Zelda” fan, this is one of the best “Zelda” games ever made. But at this point, there’s just not enough to play on it. So the hardware has massive potential, but I think a lot of people should wait until the games get better.

MARTIN: They have to because what I’m reading in the business press – yours included – is that it’s already sold out almost everywhere. Why is that?

OLIVAREZ-GILES: Well, you know, the hype is really strong. And Nintendo has a lot of hearts and minds because of decades worth of games and relationships they’ve built with gamers. You know, people hear “Mario,” and they hear “Zelda” and there’s a almost romantic and fun idea of what’s going to be happening there. So the Wii U, which was the previous Nintendo console fell flat on its face. I think they sold about 13 million units worldwide where the Wii before that sold about 100 million units. So Nintendo needs a big hit, and this is one of those make-or-break moments for the company.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, do we expect competitors like Sony and Microsoft to – makers of the PlayStation the Xbox – to follow suit?

OLIVAREZ-GILES: Microsoft and Sony so far don’t have anything like this in the works that we know of or that they’ve spoken publicly about. What they’re doing is they’re beefing up their consoles with even more processing power, and then they’re making them compatible with virtual reality headsets. Nintendo hasn’t gone the VR route yet. They say they’re open to it in the future, but they’re kind of steering clear of it.

Nintendo’s always really been more about fun game play with other people around you, rather than teraflops worth of processing power inside of a VCR-like box. And that’s really the route that Microsoft and Sony are battling in right now.

MARTIN: That was Wall Street Journal tech reporter Nathan Olivarez-Giles joining us from San Francisco. Nathan, thanks so much.

OLIVAREZ-GILES: My pleasure.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

When Amazon comes to town to sell books from a bricks-and-mortar store of its own, what happens to a neighborhood bookstore nearby?

On Tuesday, the online retailer opened a 5,800-square-foot store in Dedham, Mass. — the company’s first bookstore on the East Coast. The suburban Boston store joins Amazon’s three other locations on the West Coast.

Amazon — which started out by selling only books — has been the major reason that many traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores have struggled and even shut down.

As many people started going online to buy books, major book retailer Borders went out of business, while Barnes & Noble has closed stores over the years. Independent bookstores have struggled as well.

Just about a mile up the road from the new bookstore in Dedham is Blue Bunny Books, an independent bookstore that specializes in children’s books. Store owner Peter Reynolds, a children’s book author, said he was a little worried when he heard Amazon was moving into town.

“Oh, yes. The minute that the news came out, I got hundreds of emails from friends and fans across the country and the world saying, ‘Hey we just heard Amazon is moving up the street,’ ” Reynolds said. “And at first my heart sort of sunk a bit, but I realized quickly the response from our friends was what you have in your independent bookstore is very, very different than what Amazon is providing, and I think that we’re going to be OK.”

Blue Bunny Books has been around for about 14 years and also offers online sales and a coffee shop in store.

Ellen Modi, who stopped in to grab a drink, said she plans to keep coming to the store because she likes bringing her two young daughters to book signings.

“They have nice events with authors, and it’s just personal,” Modi said. “There’s something to be said about all these small businesses that are disappearing because all these bigger things are kind of taking over.”

Reynolds said his store is often a gathering place for the community. He hopes the unique atmosphere will keep customers coming to independent bookstores like his.

Meanwhile, Amazon hopes putting the best of online shopping on the ground helps it develop its own special and unique bookstore.

Amazon spokeswoman Deborah Bass said the store is an extension of the company’s online business and offers a bit of that experience to help customers discover new books in person.

“Beneath every book is a review card, where we include a little bit more information with some of those things that you’re familiar with at Amazon.com,” Bass said. “So, each book includes a review from a customer and it also shares the star rating. And all of the books featured in this store are four stars and above out of five stars.”

The store’s selection of about 5,700 books is based on browsing and buying data from Amazon’s website, including customer reviews and pre-order sales, as well as what’s popular on Goodreads, an Amazon-owned book review site. Customers can also try out Kindles and other Amazon devices.

Amazon has plans to open another bookstore north of Boston later this year and more locations in California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey.

Zeninjor Enwemeka is a reporter for WBUR’s BostonomiX team, which covers the people, startups and companies driving the innovation economy. You can follow them @BostonomiX.

Five storied female NASA pioneers will soon grace toy-store shelves, in Lego form.

The Danish company announced on Tuesday that it would produce the Women of NASA set, submitted by science writer Maia Weinstock.

“Women have played critical roles throughout the history of the U.S. space program,” Weinstock wrote in her project proposal. “Yet in many cases, their contributions are unknown or under-appreciated – especially as women have historically struggled to gain acceptance in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

She said the set is meant to shed light on the rich history of women in STEM professions.

It beat out eleven other projects in the Lego Ideas competition, which each had to receive votes from 10,000 supporters to be eligible.

A Lego figure of mathematician and space scientist Katherine Johnson, whose story was featured in the recent film Hidden Figures.

Maia Weinstock
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Maia Weinstock

The set features Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose story was featured in the recent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who is now 98 years old, appeared on stage at the Academy Awards on Sunday. She was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

Other NASA women honored in Lego form are:

• Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, who was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work that contributed to Apollo 11’s landing on the moon.
• Astronaut Sally Ride , the first U.S. woman in space.
• Nancy Grace Roman, who served as NASA’s chief astronomer and is seen as “instrumental in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality.”
• Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space.

“Excited to be part of such a great group of women,” Jemison tweeted after the announcement, “And even more jazzed about women in STEM!”

NASA astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison will be featured in the new Lego set.

Maia Weinstock
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Maia Weinstock

Lego says it is particularly excited about the “inspirational value” of the set. It is still determining the final product design – the photos accompanying this story were part of the proposal submitted by Weinstock.

“I hope it sets a new example for both girls and boys,” Weinstock told the BBC. “Girls, in that they can and should be engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, and boys, in that they internalise at an early age that these careers are for everyone, not only men.”

A Lego spokesperson says Women of NASA is slated for launch later this year. Other projects that were vying for Lego production included depictions of the Addams Family Mansion and the Large Hadron Collider.