Mystery Shoppers?
 

Has anyone here had experience being a mystery shopper? I heard a story on it on NPR once and see adds for it on the net all the time. I guess it just sounds like an easy way to make some money or get some free stuff, so I was thinking of doing it.

I've been wanting to do it for a long time as well since I first heard about them over 20 years ago.

I signed up with a group that markets via spam but never got picked.

I do however make sure that I give my feedback to managers all the time. I let them know via the "comments" box and the "How Am I Doing?" phone numbers. I call for good and bad experiences.

I generally get coupons for $ off future visits. While it's not the mystery shopper that I truly want to be, it's still quite a good thing.

I've done it for a restaurant chain, we applied and got picked months after we applied. Was an interesting experience, we were required to rate twice a week and we had to go in at different times, if we didn't then we lost the shopper. They reimbursed us after we filed the reports. We did it for a few months and got tired of eating there so much so we quit the program...

I've never been a secret shopper, but I have been scoped by one. Working retail and waiting tables has made me not care for secret shoppers too much. It's not that I didn't do my job well because I did, I just don't care to be evaluated without knowing. A lot of decent servers got fired because they forgot to pick up a plate or didn't make it back within the one minute after delivering the food to check back. Whenever we heard that a secret shopper had been there or may come a dark cloud settle over the wait staff and we waited for the hatchet to drop. Luckily, I got a decent report but, many met their fate. :(

However, it can be interesting because you shop for free. Yet, I wonder if it is really worth it? I will be curious to see other people's responses.

I bet its worth it, never heard of anything like that around here. But people dont get fired for missing a plate I would think?

Musta been sumpn fishy with attitude or something.

Mrs. O'Rights "shopped" local branches of a major bank, back when she was in her final year of college. She would withdrawl $10.00 from one branch, deposit it in another, transfer it to another account at yet another branch, and so on and so forth. She had a month to conduct X amount of shops, at specific bank locations. Being who she is, she would procrastinate until the last minute. The tellers, I would assume, had to have suspicions that they were being shopped. Otherwise, again I would imagine, all of this bizare activity on her account, in such a short span of time, would have sent up some sort of red flag. If she was "made" by the tellers, she was never identified, which they were required to do, under the conditions of their employment.

I knew a couple people who did that, but I don't think they ever made any serious money at it. I don't know if that was because of their own lack of motivation, the program they were in, or just the company they were doing it for.

We used to have mystery shoppers all the time and the boss man always put a lot of stock in those stupid little reports.

I can't remember the name of the company, but from my understanding you gave them a call, filled out a questionnaire and they called you back if they were interested.

I've signed up to be a mystery shopper through several different websites and called a couple of phone numbers...no luck, though.

When I was working at a video store many years ago, we used to get regular visits from secret shoppers. The reveiw would get posted on the staff room wall for everyone to see.

Our store received top marks for five months in a row (winning us all sorts of prizes) until the secret shopper got me. I recieved a less than stellar reveiw.

Sure I passed but I wasn't the A+ they were looking for. If I was in the military I am sure my co-workers would have worked me over with socks and soap.

I was a mystery shopper for about a year for a few stores, including The Gap (as well as Gap Kids and Baby Gap), Bowring and Payless....

The company that I worked for wasn't that well-organized, but there wasn't any fee to join.

I signed up to be a mystery shopper once but never actually went on an assignment after I saw how ridiculous some of the assignments were. One involved going into a Best Buy and asking a series of inane questions that no normal person would ask, and then to make a $2 purchase, for which you'd be reimbursed. I can't even think of a $2 item in Best Buy. Just seemed like too much effort for too little pay-off.

I tell the truth about the firing. As Charlatan mentioned, a stellar evaluation is wanted and if you received under 85 points you would be fired. This girl forgot the appetizer plates throughout the entire meal. She also got busy and didn't make it back for the required 2 minute check-up. The restaurant I worked at was not impressed and got rid of her.

Now, there were some good reports, I think the best was a 99. That person got praised, no raise, but got to take a day off and get the best section for awhile.

I understand that secret shoppers are important for ensuring proper service in establishments, but I could never do it because I know the ramifications of a bad report. I also know that some bad reports are because of a bad day. We all have bad days and the secret shopper is only 'shopping' for a small portion of the shift. It is not fair to put that much weight on such a miniscule measure.

back in the olden days, when i was a store manager for a women's clothing store, the company used to have our stores 'shopped' regularly. Sometimes it was a shopper company, sometimes it was just a random employee from the corporate office (my store was in a major NJ market, 25 minutes from nyc so we had visitors a lot) and often times the mall itself would send 'shoppers' in to see how the customer service was and report back.

the shopping sometimes gave valuable information, but some of the shopping reports I saw, were completely unfair. The shopper (I had a good idea of who it was when i saw the report) was an extremely unreasonable 'customer' who was doing everything in her power to be difficult and trying to get a reaction to put it down in her 'report'.

I had to get rid of a few people over the years who had bad reports from shoppers -- i was held accountable and actually lost a bonus because of one poor shopping report (from one day, during an extremely busy, understaffed day) we also had a lot of good shopping reports as well, but got nothing from that.

ok, so how do you sign up to be one? I hate seeing all those stupid ones where you have to give a "one time fee" to be a mystery shopper.

Yeah, can anyone recommed a company. If I did do it, I'd deffinitelt try to be as fair and forgiving as possibly now that I know the rammifications of a bad report.

I worked at a place with a neat twist on this concept - the secret shopLIFTER. They'd come in and steal a bunch of shit. If we caught 'em they'd give us the stuff back and show a badge that proved who they were and why we shouldn't tie 'em up and put them in the security room (yes, we did that with the occasional real shoplifter ;) )

If we didn't catch them, they'd report us, we'd catch holy hell from the corporate office, AND the secret shoplifter got to keep whatever they stole.

The only trouble was that they'd keep the ID card in their wallet, which would be in a pocket, and my store was in a bad part of town where the real shoplifters liked to pull knives or guns on us. So sometimes the secret shoplifter would get a little roughed up when he reached into his pocket too fast to show his ID ;)

When I worked at the Gap we had a secret shopper who was there to watch for shop lifters. He nailed a lot of shoplifters, including one lady who snuck some lingere into the change room under her pile of jeans and sweaters. While she was in changing, he approached me and mentioned that he saw her hide them in the pile of clothes she had taken to the change room. When she came out I asked her how the lingere fit. Her face went beet red. She slapped her forehead and ducked back into the change room... "Oops I almost forgot to return these..."

When I worked for Fred Meyers we got secret shopped. It never happened to me over the course of my tenure there, but it did happen to a couple of coworkers. Fortunately, all of us were so well-trained in the customer service principles FM practically nails to your forehead that no one ever got bad marks. A couple of people got 3 out of 4 on their marks and only got a little chat from the manager about remembering our 4 customer service ideals. If you got a 4/4 from being shopped you would receive a gold star to put on your name tag :).