I found a gig on Craiglist for a “mystery shopper” assignment, one of those deals where you visit a local business, complete some transaction, and report on how it went. I wasn’t 100% convinced I was comfortable with it, but that soon changed once I got the store list: Wal★Mart and one of those check-cashing outfits.
Hmm, I won’t set foot in a Wal★Mart, and certainly not to act as a spy for their less than stellar employee policies. And those check cashing joints give me the creeps: they take advantage of people who can ill afford it, and I don’t want to be part of that.
It was never so clear what these companies — the mystery shopper outfits — are about: they enable absentee owners to keep an eye on things without having to actually be in the store. The whole customer experience is boiled down to some reports on how fast things move, how accurate, and in some cases how patient (one of the later assignments is to try to get the employee to lose their cool: how uncomfortable would that be?). Some holding company in a distant state or country is hiring these companies and making decisions based on those reports.
You would never see a locally-owned and operated business using these services, as the owners are there. You can assume that the money paid to an outside consultant is money that doesn’t go to training or raises or any incentives to make the experience better: it’s really about finding the lowest cost per transaction, with a certain standard of quality. One more dehumanizing aspect of capitalism, perhaps?
Not for me. I’d rather dig ditches.