When Holly Stowe got married 29 years ago at Albertson Wedding Chapel, she didn’t Google it. Instead, she looked up wedding chapels in the Yellow Pages.

40 years ago, Albertson was named with the phone book in mind.

“Back then for advertising purposes, you needed to be in the Yellow Pages. You needed to have the biggest ad,” said Daniel Franco, owner of the Albertson Wedding Chapel. “If you couldn’t afford the biggest ad, you had to at least be at the top of the category people were searching for.”

His dad Alex Franco, the chapel's founder, came up with the name Albertson because he knew it would be among the first in the listings.

“If there was an Albertson before my father took that name, he would have gone A Albertson or something. He was all about business,” Franco said. “People think my name is Albert. I’m not. And I’m not the son of Albert, either. It’s just a made up name: Albertson.”

The name Albertson was thoroughly thought out. Franco wanted a name with universal appeal unlike his competitor at the time: Guadalupe Wedding Chapel.

Couples find Albertson Wedding Chapel from its Yelp page.

“That’s a very Latino-centric name,” Franco said, noting his father’s own Latino heritage. “My father opened up in Wilshire La Brea and he thought a name that’s Latino like that would never work here in this area. So he came up with Albertson. He figured all cultures could at least understand the name Albertson.”

Gone are the days of phone books. Today most of the chapel’s customers find their wedding destination by word of mouth, its website or through Yelp reviews.

The Internet, of course, raises new challenges.

“We’ve noticed that anything said on Yelp drastically affects our business," said Patricia Cortez, the chapel's manager. "So we have to really bend over backwards for people, sometimes to the detriment of somebody else’s wedding. For instance, sometimes somebody will be super late, so we have to rush them out of here. In result, they [negatively] Yelp us, but it’s not because of us, it’s because they were late.”

The chapel had a 4.5 star rating out of 5 stars on Yelp with 59 reviews as of Jan. 28. Cortez said Yelp keeps the staff on their toes.

The retaliation reviews are sparse, but they happen. Some of the critical reviews are warranted, Cortez said.

“I won’t say we’re perfect. We do make mistakes, but we always try to correct them before people leave. When we do make mistakes, we talk to people, we give them a call,” she said. “We never ask anyone to take off their review. After all, that helps us train our staff and us to just be better at running the business.”

This is part of a larger story. Read Going To The Chapel: Tying The Knot Without Breaking The Bank for more. 

Contact Staff Reporter Hillary Jackson here.