This month, I have completed 5 mystery shops. Two were grocery shops, and three were retail shops. I have come to the realization that this is just not my thing. Now don't get me wrong, it sounds great... Get paid to shop, something you do anyway right? This may be true,but it takes a certain kind of personality to do Mystery Shopping, and I do not fit the bill. If you have a get in, get your stuff and get out way of shopping like I do, then the Mystery Shopping process will drive you batty.
This post, I will cover my Grocery Shopping Experience. For one thing, there is a lot of paperwork involved. For each shop, there is a set of criteria you must meet. On average there are five pages of instructions for you to follow. These pages basically cover what you must enter into the computer after your shop. You have to evaluate customer service, whether you were greeted when within a certain range of the employee, how you were greeted, what the employee was doing when you encountered them, etc. You must evaluate the service deli and bakery for service, for example, did they offer you a sample or try and make a sale. In the check out line, you have to see if the store is observing the three is a crowd policy, did the cashier discover the big item at the bottom of the cart, did they tell you how much you saved, etc.
For the grocery shops, I was paid $5 and reimbursed $15 for groceries. So far, so good. If I were to do four of these a month I would get $80 towards my grocery bill. Who can't use that kind of money towards their grocery bill? Especially if you have teenagers? Problem is, the shops require you to spend about 45 minutes browsing in the store, attempting to have encounters with the employees. BORING! You see, they want you to have encounters with employees in the enter aisles of the store... the ghostland... the place where the employees only go between the hours of 5 and 7 am, before the store opens, when it is stocking time. I chose to go on my shops around 4:30 pm, on the weekend. I figured during this time of day, it should be bustling with activity. So I entered the front of the store on right, did a reconnaissance of the front of the store, checked out the cashier stations, and then began to work my way through the store from left to right, up one aisle and down the next, making my slow, slow way through the store, vainly attempting to run into an employee in the middle of the store. I did this two times at the first grocery store, and never saw an employee outside of the meat, produce and deli sections. At the second grocery store, I lucked out. I ran into an employee stocking in the center of the store right off the bat, so at least I didn't have to wander around and round.
After your shop, you have to enter your evaluation into the Mystery Shop website. You have to enter the names of the employees you encountered, their description if you were unable to read their name tag, what they were doing when you encountered them, etc. Unfortunately, the process is set-up so that they expect you to enter three employees per area, and if you only encountered one, you have to complete two additional pages explaining why you were unable to complete an encounter. You evaluate the stores cleanliness and layout, behavior of the employees, etc. It takes about as much time to fill out the web form and scan in your paperwork as it does to complete your shop. chances are, i won't be doing any more of these shops in the near future, as the time involved does not quite compensate for the reimbursement level.
Stay tuned for my next post, revealing (among other things) why you need to pay attention when your shop application asks if you have sensitivity to perfume, and why you should just say no to shops that ask you to rate associates by how attractive they are. Also, find out how to easily terrify a cashier by asking his name.
