I read a blog recently by Juliet Grossman, a woman who lives in Temecula, Calif. This post caught my eye because she gave a fantastic “review” of her very first mystery shopping experience. The title? “I Ain’t Wearin’ a Freakin’ Wire, Man!”
- Image via Wikipedia
She’s a character. And really, really cool.
Like many mystery shoppers, she was drawn in by the tantalizing idea of getting paid for doing one of the things she loved best. She did her research, and after being nearly overwhelmed by the variety of businesses she could survey, she eventually honed in on new housing developments. She called the industry “so ubiquitous…that it’s practically a cliché,” and it didn’t hurt that the gigs paid their shoppers well.
The post is hilarious, a sort of cautionary tale: all the things they never tell you when you become a mystery shopper. She laments the fact that these “new homes” aren’t, in fact, homey at all (they’re just empty houses with no character), runs down her experience buying and testing a device to record audio of her shopping experiences — the wire she referred to in the title — and related every excruciating detail of her first shop: Susie Smith in Paradise Hills.
She dramatizes all the panic and fear of the first-timer, from the certainty that she’d forget something within the 25-page shopper manual to the paranoia of being discovered on hidden camera and exposed as a nefarious mystery shopper. So different from the “low-tech” mystery shopping trips she took with her mother as a child!
Despite all the anxiety brought on by her first experience, Juliet admits she was hooked immediately when she received that first $50 check. She really had been paid…just to go shopping.
One of the things I loved best about her post: It showed the human side of mystery shopping. Businesses often only see the results of their shoppers’ surveys and questionnaires; the people who came in to shop them are little more than paperwork after all is said and done.
But Juliet’s humor and insight are a great reminder that even though they come equipped with a list of questions — and maybe even a wire under their clothes — these mystery shoppers are customers just as much as the paying folks who are there by choice.
Any customer could be a mystery shopper, and by the same token, any mystery shopper could be a customer in the future.
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