How must I prove a business has closed?

[Chris]

I marked a local shoe repair business as closed, only to have Listings Editor deny my edit because he claimed I have the wrong information.  The store is about five blocks from my house, so I took this photo of the storefront, with the overhead sign obviously removed and the former storefront now boarded over with what appears to be a semi-permanent hot dog cart parked in front of it.  So just what exactly must I do to "prove" that I have accurate information?  

https://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=39&fid=0x864e625d8ddfa02b:0x5757982e92a961ea

[eastwest]

In my experience, "has wrong information" is (an infuriating) shorthand for "I don't know what I'm looking at, and I'm too lazy to come up with a good reason." Protesting the review does not good -- if the reviewer cared enough to start with, he or she would've given you better feedback.

That said, it's pretty hard to prove that a business is gone to people who don't pass by the place regularly. What may help is if you took a closer-up photo of the business, showing its address somewhere so that the photo can be correlated with the listing in the map. If you're able to geotag the photo, that would be even better.

[Flash]

Google Reviewers no longer leave feedback; it is part of their workflow.  You must actually initiate a conversation with them to get feedback, which they are supposed to always supply when asked.

On your initial review, mention something along the lines of "I drove past this today, everything removed, for lease sign up."  In most cases this will get it approved if you have a decent amount of approved reviews, which I see you do.

The big thing is that closing a business will impact them a lot if they are still open, so reviewers tend to error on the side of caution.  There are a lot of spammers out there trying to mark their competition as closed.  Many have done a lot of junk edits to make it appear that they have a high trust level.