Closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday
A 40-year Virginia restaurant loses its weekends to a wrong line of hours on Google, and the real damage happens in the stretch before anyone finds out.
FactUnion VerifiedEvery fact on the episode's fact sheet was checked against its sources. Wrong facts were corrected. What this meansFacts checked 21 Oct 2026
Chapters (8)
About this episode
In early 2012, the Serbian Crown in Great Falls, Virginia, had been open at the same site for nearly forty years. Then its weekend customers fell by about three quarters. Its owner, Rene Bertagna, found out why only when a regular phoned to ask why he was closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The Google listing showed the wrong hours. Staff were laid off, and Wired reports the restaurant closed in April 2013. He sued Google. We found nothing on the record about how the suit ended.
Nell takes the story in order. Hank works out what a quiet weekend costs and why the books never tell you the reason. Together they look at how listings actually change: suggested edits from strangers, Google's own automatic updates, duplicates, hijacked phone numbers and listings nobody has touched in months. They also look at what nobody measures. The episode ends with what we'd steal from this: small, regular habits for any barber, lash tech, food truck or cafe that gets new customers from 'near me' searches.
Hosted by Nell and Hank, performed by synthetic voices. Supported by Lynqly.
Facts and sources
Every fact used in this episode, with the sources it was checked against. Download as data
204 of 204 recorded lines matched the checked script.
Wired reports that in early 2012 the Serbian Crown saw “a sudden 75 percent drop off in customers on the weekend”.
Bertagna told Wired that a regular customer phoned to ask: “Why are you closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday?”
Bertagna was forced to lay off some of his staff and shut the Serbian Crown in April 2013.
Wired writes: “His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere”.
Wired says the slump continued for months and that Bertagna learned of the wrong listing only later; no source gives the date the hours were changed or when he found out.
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The Serbian Crown was in Great Falls, Virginia, and Bertagna sued Google in federal court in Virginia over a Google Places listing that showed the restaurant closed on weekends.
Bertagna hired an internet consultant who got back into the listing and changed the hours, but the customers did not return.
Eater reported (July 8, 2014) that Bertagna’s lawyer believes “a competing restaurant sabotaged the Google Places listing to drive away the Serbian Crown’s customers”.
A Google filing quoted by Eater said: “The Serbian Crown should not be permitted to vex Google or this Court with such meritless claims”.
The Guardian (July 8, 2014) noted that anyone with a Google+ account could submit changes to a Google+ Local page.
Wired reports that in 2010 the Google listing of Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry in Buffalo was changed to ‘permanently closed’ while fake negative reviews came in, and that the listing was later repaired.
Consultant Mike Blumenthal told Wired that a small interior-design shop’s phone number was changed through a community edit, which he traced to a competitor.
Sterling Sky notes that Local Guides can suggest edits affecting information such as hours, that not all suggested edits are applied, and that businesses cannot directly approve or reject them.
Google’s 2025 Maps safety report, as summarised by Search Engine Roundtable, says Google blocked 79 million inaccurate or unverified edits and removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles.
The same report summary says Google blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025, up from 240 million in 2024.
Google’s Ian Leader called its machine-learning filtering “the first line of defense” for Maps content, followed by human moderators and volunteer Local Guides who check business information.
Whitespark reported that in late March 2020 Google auto-applied a ‘Temporarily Closed’ label to some businesses based on government sources, and that some owners got a ‘marked as closed’ alert after using Special Hours for closures.
Ozva Digital (Sept 15, 2026) writes: “Anyone on Maps can use ‘Suggest an edit’ to report a place as closed; a few reports in a row and Google applies the label, sometimes at the hands of a competitor.”
Ozva Digital says a long-unanswered phone, a changed address, a listing untouched for months or an offline website can lead Google to treat a business as closed, and that a neglected listing can “drop back to ‘closed’ on a single user suggestion” (an agency account, not Google policy).
Ozva Digital says that in its cases an owner with dashboard access saw the closed label disappear within a few hours to three days, while the ‘Suggest an edit’ route has no fixed timeline and no written reply from Google.
Ozva Digital says creating a new listing instead of fixing the closed one makes a duplicate that doesn’t carry over reviews, and that after a relocation the old listing can keep showing as closed.
Wimi (March 17, 2026) warns that suggested edits from other users “can come back” after an owner fixes them and says there is no precise industry-wide dollar figure for the cost.
Guard.io says that if multiple false reports say the same thing, “even falsely, it can trigger changes to your profile without your approval”.
Red Door Technologies lists the routes to a hijacked profile as account takeover, fraudulent suggested edits that get accepted, unclaimed listings and fake duplicate listings, and says a swapped phone number or ‘permanently closed’ label quietly turns customers away.
Proof Reports describes listing hijacking in which a scammer gains edit access to a real business’s listing and swaps in their own phone number while the name, reviews and address stay the same, and claims locksmith, garage-door and towing listings are hit at disproportionate rates without giving a figure.
A summary of Whitespark’s 2026 local ranking-factors survey of 47 experts lists a business being marked permanently closed as the number-one negative factor.
Removed during checking (1)
Google's Business Profile Help says anyone can suggest an edit to a profile they don't own or manage, and tells owners about their own edits: "We review your changes before we update them live on your profile."
