The Truth About Mystery Shopping
Jan. 10th, 2009 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraGatsby was short on the hamster payroll last month. ("Hamsters" is my nickname for the Mystery Shoppers.) He tried to write it off as a bookkeeping mistake – I heard him explaining to Christina, “It’s because Christmas was on a Thursday, see? On a Thursday.” But I recognized that tone in Gatsby’s voice. A little too boisterous. A little too much bonhomie. He’s singing my song: I’m forever kiting mon-eee, pretty money in hot air.
To the best of my knowledge this is Gatsby’s first major financial stumble. I guarantee it won’t be his last. Business is down 25% from what it was this time last year. Gatsby’s starting to panic. He’s actually coming in to the office.
Though he still leaves by eleven.
No big surprise to me therefore when at 10:55am today he beckoned me into his office.
“Look, we’re over-staffed,” he began and I’m thinking, Good – he’s laying me off. Unemployment. A mere pittance, of course; he totally underpays me for the work I’m doing so he can’t be contributing much to the government slush fund. But free money is free money.
Instead though he continues, “So I’m going to have to cut your salary. We’re a family here, I know how tough times are and I hate to have to do this. I’ve asked the fulltime staff to take two unpaid absent days a month –“
We’re a family? What does that mean exactly? He wants a kidney? I smile and blink, murmur something appropriately obsequious. Really nothing else for me to do. There aren’t any jobs in Monterey. I can pretty much do anything but it doesn’t matter ‘cause there aren’t any jobs in Monterey. And right now I need the extra income.
At my last scut job on old Fort Ord I remember DeShanda or DeWanda or whatever the hell her name was scowling, “You work too damn fast.” It took me a while to understand that the faster any one of us worked, the less work would be left over for the rest to pretend to be doing. Here, the opposite is true. The little editors try to earn Gatsby’s love by working faster and faster and faster. I want to tell them sometimes, slow down: then you won’t be quite as expendable.
They’re a nice group but a strange group, these little Mystery Shopping girlies. I’ve been there a year and I know absolutely nothing about what music they listen to, what movies they like. We work in total silence, no music, no comforting backtide of chatter about our lives. It’s been freezing cold in the office this past two weeks – one of Gatsby’s economies, turning off the heat. I dress for the potato fields of suburban Dubrovnik – multiple layers of sweaters, fingerless gloves, a long ugly knitted scarf that winds around my head.
###
Mystery shopping is a really great scam. I wish I’d come up with it.
You style yourself a “market research company,” you put ads up on Craig’s List for shoppers. Then you come up with a survey, and you unleash the shoppers.
The shoppers are typically paid between $7 and $10 for a shop. Sometimes but not always they get reimbursed for incidental expenses – if the “shop” calls for a purchase for example. Sometimes. Not always. The thing is in the shoppers’ minds they are getting paid to shop. Also, there’s a kind of power thing going on, kind of like the thing you can observe on any airport security line. Airport security personnel get paid slightly above minimum wage. In no way could the job be considered prestige employment. But airport security personnel make the most of it. “Take those shoes off, sir,” they snap at that Marketing Vice President who makes more in a month than they make in a year. “Please come over here.” They enjoy humiliating people.
So do Mystery Shoppers.
Their reports are a trip.
“Associate did not make eye contact. Associate’s voice was not friendly when they asked, ‘Do you want fries with that Whopper?’ Associate did not give a pleasant parting remark.”
They’re talking about a Fast Food employee who makes minimum wage, not a waiter in a four star restaurant.
Companies pay about $50 per report. Five of that goes upfront to the software designer who generates and hosts the report templates. Another $10 goes to shopper. Another – let’s say five – goes to operational overhead, office rent, office utilities, the miniscule amount the copyeditors get paid.
That’s $30 per report that’s sheer profit.
Let’s say we process 2000 reports per month.
That’s $720, 000 a year pure profit.
###
Gatsby grew up in West Virginia. He was a poor boy. Dad left, Mom drank. Gatsby played baseball, lots and lots of baseball. He grew quite good at it, so good at it that he won a baseball scholarship. I don’t know what college but I’m thinking some place like USC because he did horribly academically, but did manage to plug into an Old Boys Network which is much, much more important.
Gatsby is a natural born salesman. Big and bouncy, like an overgrown toddler with a confident, bright and artless smile. Pleasant line of chatter, too, and a restless intelligence that darts from subject to subject.
He met Daisy, his wife, in a bar. She was on her cell phone, talking to her boyfriend. Their eyes locked across the crowded room.
Gatsby approached.
“You are going to break up with him,” said Gatsby, pointing to the phone. “You are going to come home with me.”
I’m not sure she did that night. But now they’re married.
I’m not sure what Daisy’s appeal is either. Her voice doesn’t really sound like money, it sounds like Studio City or Encino. She’s a Valley Girl, petite, buffed, with a shrewd, heart-shaped face, attractive but not beautiful.
They live a pretty good life on the grounds in Pasadera – the real estate development that ruined Lee Newell. But I’m thinking there’s trouble in paradise.
To the best of my knowledge this is Gatsby’s first major financial stumble. I guarantee it won’t be his last. Business is down 25% from what it was this time last year. Gatsby’s starting to panic. He’s actually coming in to the office.
Though he still leaves by eleven.
No big surprise to me therefore when at 10:55am today he beckoned me into his office.
“Look, we’re over-staffed,” he began and I’m thinking, Good – he’s laying me off. Unemployment. A mere pittance, of course; he totally underpays me for the work I’m doing so he can’t be contributing much to the government slush fund. But free money is free money.
Instead though he continues, “So I’m going to have to cut your salary. We’re a family here, I know how tough times are and I hate to have to do this. I’ve asked the fulltime staff to take two unpaid absent days a month –“
We’re a family? What does that mean exactly? He wants a kidney? I smile and blink, murmur something appropriately obsequious. Really nothing else for me to do. There aren’t any jobs in Monterey. I can pretty much do anything but it doesn’t matter ‘cause there aren’t any jobs in Monterey. And right now I need the extra income.
At my last scut job on old Fort Ord I remember DeShanda or DeWanda or whatever the hell her name was scowling, “You work too damn fast.” It took me a while to understand that the faster any one of us worked, the less work would be left over for the rest to pretend to be doing. Here, the opposite is true. The little editors try to earn Gatsby’s love by working faster and faster and faster. I want to tell them sometimes, slow down: then you won’t be quite as expendable.
They’re a nice group but a strange group, these little Mystery Shopping girlies. I’ve been there a year and I know absolutely nothing about what music they listen to, what movies they like. We work in total silence, no music, no comforting backtide of chatter about our lives. It’s been freezing cold in the office this past two weeks – one of Gatsby’s economies, turning off the heat. I dress for the potato fields of suburban Dubrovnik – multiple layers of sweaters, fingerless gloves, a long ugly knitted scarf that winds around my head.
Mystery shopping is a really great scam. I wish I’d come up with it.
You style yourself a “market research company,” you put ads up on Craig’s List for shoppers. Then you come up with a survey, and you unleash the shoppers.
The shoppers are typically paid between $7 and $10 for a shop. Sometimes but not always they get reimbursed for incidental expenses – if the “shop” calls for a purchase for example. Sometimes. Not always. The thing is in the shoppers’ minds they are getting paid to shop. Also, there’s a kind of power thing going on, kind of like the thing you can observe on any airport security line. Airport security personnel get paid slightly above minimum wage. In no way could the job be considered prestige employment. But airport security personnel make the most of it. “Take those shoes off, sir,” they snap at that Marketing Vice President who makes more in a month than they make in a year. “Please come over here.” They enjoy humiliating people.
So do Mystery Shoppers.
Their reports are a trip.
“Associate did not make eye contact. Associate’s voice was not friendly when they asked, ‘Do you want fries with that Whopper?’ Associate did not give a pleasant parting remark.”
They’re talking about a Fast Food employee who makes minimum wage, not a waiter in a four star restaurant.
Companies pay about $50 per report. Five of that goes upfront to the software designer who generates and hosts the report templates. Another $10 goes to shopper. Another – let’s say five – goes to operational overhead, office rent, office utilities, the miniscule amount the copyeditors get paid.
That’s $30 per report that’s sheer profit.
Let’s say we process 2000 reports per month.
That’s $720, 000 a year pure profit.
Gatsby grew up in West Virginia. He was a poor boy. Dad left, Mom drank. Gatsby played baseball, lots and lots of baseball. He grew quite good at it, so good at it that he won a baseball scholarship. I don’t know what college but I’m thinking some place like USC because he did horribly academically, but did manage to plug into an Old Boys Network which is much, much more important.
Gatsby is a natural born salesman. Big and bouncy, like an overgrown toddler with a confident, bright and artless smile. Pleasant line of chatter, too, and a restless intelligence that darts from subject to subject.
He met Daisy, his wife, in a bar. She was on her cell phone, talking to her boyfriend. Their eyes locked across the crowded room.
Gatsby approached.
“You are going to break up with him,” said Gatsby, pointing to the phone. “You are going to come home with me.”
I’m not sure she did that night. But now they’re married.
I’m not sure what Daisy’s appeal is either. Her voice doesn’t really sound like money, it sounds like Studio City or Encino. She’s a Valley Girl, petite, buffed, with a shrewd, heart-shaped face, attractive but not beautiful.
They live a pretty good life on the grounds in Pasadera – the real estate development that ruined Lee Newell. But I’m thinking there’s trouble in paradise.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-10 07:41 pm (UTC)Jeff
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 04:34 pm (UTC)But he didn't go for it.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-10 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 04:36 pm (UTC)I didn't say that. I said his staff -- scheduling director, client liasions, proofreaders -- are all women.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 04:29 pm (UTC)