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Mystery Shopper > Mystery Shopper Jobs >
In Your Face
In Your Face Mystery Shopping
There are some types of mystery shopping that can be quite interesting.
For the most part you are truly doing secret shopping, when you go into
a store and evaluate the employees and the condition of the
establishment. There are times, however, when you will need to be right
in the employees face and they will know exactly who you are and what
you are doing. How do you do one of these jobs and are they worth the
effort?
When you first see one of these mystery shopping jobs come available
you will be surprised at the amount of money that they are willing to
offer. I know that when I took on my first job of this type, I was
offered $40 for the shop. This was a lot more than I was used to
getting, as many of my shops only were paying $10 or so for a few
minutes work. This looked interesting, however, and I decided to give
it a try so I took the job.
The first thing that hit me was the large amount of paperwork that was
necessary to do before you took the job. Most mystery shopping jobs
have a training program, from donut shops to gas station shops, they
all want you to know what to look for. Most of these tests are common
sense and once you know what they want you can be done with the test in
a matter of a few minutes. This type of job, however, took me over an
hour to take the initial training, I was not happy that it took this
long but thought I could make up the time somewhere along the line.
Once I went into the store, which happened to be a Kmart, I was to go
right to the customer service area and announce who I was and why I was
there. They were not informed ahead of time that I would be coming so
it was a secret in that way, but from that point on they were aware
that I would be evaluating them. It turns out that it didn't matter
anyway, as I was not evaluating their performance, I was evaluating the
condition of the store.
A manager from the store was assigned to me, to walk around and assist
me in any way that I needed. What I was really doing was to make sure
that things were stocked according to specifications and that they were
tagged properly. For the most part it was an uncomfortable situation,
as the manager was not very happy that I was there. The good thing is
that they scored very well on their evaluation because the store was in
order and almost everything was priced correctly.
After leaving I was sure that I was going to be in for hours of
evaluation online but to my surprise, I only had to answer about 6
questions. So was the shop worth the money? Not really, it took me
several hours and I ended up making about $6 an hour overall. I think I
have learned a lessen, however, and I'll stick with the small shops as
they pay better in the long run.
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