Greetings from the Great White North - Calgary, Alberta

Both my wife and I are Mystery Shoppers and have been doing so for the past 3 years. We especially like working restaurant shops as a team that requires two people. The up side, is we treat our restaurant shops as "date night" with a twist of course, in that we need to dot our "I's" and cross our "T's" and obtain required details. The down side is the Mystery Shop companies classify us as one account so our turnaround times for each shop are applied to both of us, meaning when my wife is assigned a particular restaurant and I accompany her, neither of us can apply for that shop location again until the the reassignment period has elapsed.

I come from a Law Enforcement & Security background and retired in Sep 2016, I like paying attention to detail and now have more time to spend on conducting shops and writing reports, I treat it like a hobby to keep me occupied. I use three primary APPS to assist me in conducting and documenting shops, I use "Shopit", "My Logs Pro" and "My Easy Tip Calculator" APPS, I also use various video cameras, including a coffee mug cam, glasses cam, button cam, cell phone cam and vehicle key fob cam to record my shops as well. Video is an excellent shop tool to ensure your timings are very accurate down to the second. I also use a free Windows program called "Media Player Classic Cinema", available for download at www.mpc-hc.org .. this program is awesome, it allows you to view your video in normal speed, three slow motion and three fast motion speeds so you can quickly navigate to the key points of the video. when my wife and I document beverage, appetizer, entree and dessert timings, we document our timings down to the second from the exact time the server leaves the table with our orders to the time that each item is delivered and announced or touches the table. Last but not least I use the Windows "Snipping Tool" (available in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista or can be downloaded) to capture photos from my video scenes when I pause the video at key scenes. My wife also audio records each shop as a backup method. So in summary, we audio record, video record and use APPS for all our shops.

As our American counterparts, who I refer to as "our cousins from the south", you folks are very fortunate, you have a huge selection of shops to choose from. We, in Canada, do not have anywhere near the same volume and variety of shops to choose from.
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I would appreciate any suggestions any of my Canadian counterparts or American cousins have for me as to which Mystery Shop Companies I should register with so that my wife and I can do more shops than we currently do.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/2016 01:10PM by identifysecuritygmail.com.

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Welcome to the forum, neighbors! We have Canadians in here who can be of more help than I can for pointing you to companies who have shops in Canada (I live in Ohio). I do know that SQM (Sensor Quality Management) is Canadian based. Bare International might have some shops in Calgary but really not sure. Check out the list at the bottom of the page for mystery shopping companies, and when you go to each website you should be able to get information on whether they do shops in Canada or not. I know of other husband and wife teams who have separate accounts. You might want to inquire with individual companies on the correct protocol. I know there are companies who only want one person to do the work for their assignments so you may have to get individual accounts with those MSCs. Other MSCs like Marketforce frown on having two shoppers in the same household I do believe. I have heard stories of deactivation because of that.

Happy shopping!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/2016 01:18PM by JASFLALMT.
Thank you for your quick response. My wife and I do have separate accounts with each company that we currently do shops for. That being said, on a "shopper + 1 guest" shop, in particular for a restaurant shop, we attend together and are treated as one account by the companies for those shops ... I totally understand why ... the reason for the revisit times is to ensure the shopper does not attend so frequently that they are noticed, instead, they are attend less often as to appear as a regular customer, if my wife and I were allowed to conduct the same shop as separate accounts, we would be at each location more often and that could compromise our anonymity.
Got it. That being said, if you get an account with Marketforce, do be careful to check on whether two people in the same household are allowed to each have an account. I am pretty sure that they have shops in Canada, though. Have a great day!
Oh my, I am in the dark ages compared to the technology you use!

I live on the prairie, East of Red Deer. Which companies are you signed up with? I find many companies have a couple of clients, so I have to check a lot of job boards to find a variety of shops to do.

The main ones I've been using lately are:

performalogics, consumer connection, strategic evaluations, shopper's confidential, wecheckservices, premierservice, intouch, frontlineshoppers, Alta60, Bare international.
The MSC's that my wife and I both are members of are:

The following MSC's are ones that we are active with in Canada:

A Closer Look
BARE Int'l
Bestmark
SQM (Sensors Quality Management)
Customer Impact
Frontline Shoppers
Retail Track
Spotcheck Services

In addition to the above, the following are additional companies that we do contract work for when in the USA.
Coyle Mystery Shopping
Elite CX Solutions
GFK Mystery Shopping
RBG Mystery Shops

Not all of the above MSC's do Canadian Shops, but the ones that do not, are good sources for us when we travel to the USA, which is a HUGE mystery shop market compared to Canada, we are much smaller in comparison. We visited Austin last year for a month and did 19 shops in Austin during that month, so you can be as busy as you want to be.
Thanks for that. I keep thinking of video shops.
I am with all of those except for Elite.

Sign up with more companies. You can be as busy as you want to be here too. And maybe you are.

Seelevelhx is filling up my inbox today. Do you work for Lanla? performalogics is a Calgary company and has quite a variety of clients
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