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    No, The DMV Is Not The Most Hated Government Service (According To Yelp)

    You may think the Department of Motor Vehicles is the worst, but Yelp reviews tell a different story.

    It’s a bedrock belief among Americans that the Department of Motor Vehicles is a terrible place to have to go. But it turns out there’s another government service Americans hate more: the post office.


    Online reviewers give DMVs substantially higher ratings than post offices, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of Yelp data. DMVs garnered an average of 3.19 of 5 stars. Government-run post offices got just 2.39 — 33% lower than the DMV average.

    Yelp provided BuzzFeed News with the number of reviews, and average review, of every DMV and post office in its system. The data — representing 54,289 total reviews of 6,124 total establishments — and analysis can be found here.

    The post-office/DMV gap is even broader in some states. New Yorkers, for example, rate their post offices the lowest of any state in the country (excluding states with fewer than 100 total reviews), at 1.92 average stars. But New York DMVs are highly praised — they rank as the fifth-highest in the country, at 3.42 average stars. All told, DMVs in New York rate 78% better than post offices there.

    The lowest-rated post offices in the country are located largely in the Northeast. Meanwhile, the lowest-rated DMVs are all over the country, but largely on the eastern seaboard.

    Want to see how your state’s DMVs and post offices fared? Take a look at the maps below: