mystery shopping revealed

I've had to remove a couple of things from this weblog since I started it. The first one was an essay I wrote about mystery shopping, because someone offered to give me money to publish it in a newsletter. And the second was an entry where I wrote some pretty personal things about an ex and then gave him the address to this site. I have some rules about this page, and one of them is that I will never use this space to communicate with anyone in my real life. If I have something to say to you, you will not read it here, you will hear it from my lips. (Another rule is I am a money whore and if someone wants to pay me to rip down an essay here or there, I am up in my control panel deleting shit faster than you can say Paypal.)

Anyway, the entry about my ex is gone forever, but the one about mystery shopping is mine again to do with as I please. So I'm putting it back (with the expletives added back in) just in case I can help another desperate person looking for a fast way to make some cash.
===

A couple weeks after quitting my job I was starting to feel useless and began struggling to come up with something to do with my time.  It’s not that I have a problem finding things to do, I’m just not getting paid for the things I choose to do like going to the park and the grocery store, doing errands, coming up with exciting new games to play with the baby each day and hanging out watching Tivo.  These are a few of my favorite things and none of them pay.

My skills don’t easily translate to an at-home job. They really don’t translate to a flexible job of any kind at all, since I need to be in a lab to do the work I’m good at.

So I hopped online and went to this work-at-home-mom website to try and find a new career.  I’m not into any of that TupperwareCandlesAvon Party shit so I skipped past all that and that’s when I found Mystery Shopping.  A whole big list of Mystery Shopping companies who pay you to shop at stores and write reports tattling on the people who work there.  Long ago I worked in retail and I’ve been ratted out myself by many a Mystery Shopper, so I figured I knew pretty much what to expect from the gig.  I immediately signed up with five companies, took the little tests they make you take to show that you are indeed literate and can follow directions, read the contracts and then, high on the idea of what a great cash flow opportunity this could be, I accepted a bunch of work.

It wasn’t until I got into the details that I realized what a fucking scam this shit is.  My first assignment was to go to a pet store with a list of SIXTY items and, without arousing the suspicion of the store workers, hunt down each item and record its price.  Then I was to go home and enter it all into the computer by midnight the same day and submit it for approval.  And do you know how much they were going to pay me as a reward for performing this task?  SEVEN DOLLARS. 

Yeah, I blew it off.  Which wasn’t as easy as I thought seeing as how I received several angry phone calls and emails and finally they kicked me out of their shopper database for being unreliable.  Yeah, fuck your seven dollars.  I could find seven dollars in change on the ground at the park if I put a little effort into it.

The next job (with a different company) was to evaluate a daycare center.  I was to call during business hours and have a detailed phone conversation for fifteen minutes, asking questions according to a checklist.  I was then to visit the daycare unannounced and do a tour, again asking questions according to the checklist and remembering very specific details like everyone’s name or description of appearance, how many children present, and a million other little things about the general state of the facility.  I would then come home and write up a detailed report about my findings, elaborating on the eighty-question checklist all using perfect grammar and punctuation.  There was a clause in there somewhere reminding me to hang on to my notes for several months because sometimes companies don’t like their report and try to challenge your findings.  And do you know how much this little task paid?  Twelve dollars.  TWELVE DOLLARS ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  It wasn’t even close to my house, and besides what the fuck am I going to do with twelve dollars?  It’s like a half day of work, which ends up being like three dollars an hour.  Eat me. 

I’m still getting requests to do jobs.  Apparently there’s a big fast food chicken emergency happening right now and I’ve been receiving frantic emails all morning for someone, ANYONE, to go to KFC and buy a snacker sandwich to see if the cashier will try to sell a drink to go with it. The location is like twenty miles from my house and the report is three pages long and life is too short, man.  Oh yeah, and it pays…ten dollars.  Plus the cost of the food.   Never mind that I would rather drink Windex than put anything from KFC in my body (this of course does not count when I am pregnant.  I had a KFC emergency during my pregnancy that was harsh and I ate twelve dollars of greasy chicken and it was so good I wanted to rub the bones all over my body after I was done and drink the leftover gravy—pregnancy is not a pretty time in a girl’s life), those snacker sandwiches look disgusting.

So that’s the story about how mystery shopping will not be my new career path.  I haven’t blocked the emails yet because I’m still waiting for that dream shop assignment to come through.  Something like being reimbursed for testing and evaluating every coffee drink at a Dunkin Donuts.  Until then I’m working on some other stuff but one thing is for sure, I’m not your cheap labor.

Comments

[sherry]

*Scratches Mystery Shopper off my list of possible work-at-home mom jobs*

[hubs]

so my comment suggestion worked?

who publlished the article?

funnay as always mid