I am going to approach this discussion with my hands held up hoping you guys will not shoot me at the end. I have read several threads about editors, and since I am an editor on a VERY part-time basis, I thought I would share a few thoughts. Mystery shopping is my bread and butter and editing represented less than 5% of my total income for all of 2012. I have tremendous respect for everyone in the chain of mystery shopping. I have been dinged more than once on reports by editors that made ridiculous claims about my report. I should also note that unless you shop for a specific company in Australia, rest assured, I have not edited any of your reports.
If you are like me, you scrutinize every detail of the instructions on what needs to be done on the shop, however, the actual reporting instructions are sometimes barely skimmed over, if read at all. (Well, that is until I started editing. ) I knew how many hours I had to submit the report, but may not have checked if I need to use associate names or a generic name, if I was supposed to spell out numbers or use the numeral, or if using contractions were permitted, just to name a few. This is where the editor comes in. It is their job to fix these oversights, remove opinions, and ensure that every reporting requirement was followed all while editing the report as lightly as possible. Editors also have to completely remove comments from time to time as well. Example: Shopper writes, “He was a crotchety, fat old man, but did look just like Santa Claus.” Ummmm…..All I could take from that was, “The team member was a male.”
Those are just some of my thoughts/opinions/nothing worth shooting me over.

I appreciate your comments.

I think some of the problem is that there is no universal standard for MS reports. Some companies want you to use the associate's name throughout the report; some don't even want you to refer to their gender. Some want chatty narrative that tells a story, some don't want comments unless you have to explain a ding and then they don't give you enough characters to adequately explain. If I've done ten shops today, no, I really am not going to go through and read every reporting instruction for every shop. If it's not in the body of the report I'm filling out at the moment, I'm not going to see it, and if I've done the shop more than four times, any instructions in the report will fade into the background and I won't even see there are instructions there, let alone what they say to do. That's just human nature.

So I do the best I can in the amount of time I can justify giving for the amount of money I was paid, and know that some editor out there wouldn't have a job if all the mystery shoppers were perfectly perfect.

And then there are times when the subject hits point A, touches on point B, and hits point C, and you report A&C. It's nice to have the editor ask, "What about B?"

I give in! I give in! I am up long after I wanted to be explaining my reports!!! One more clarification request and I may just chalk today up as a total waste of of make-up, dressing in something other than yoga pants and a t-shirt, and call it a day!! Joke's on me for sticking up for editors.

Now that's what we're talking about.

I totally understand the predicament of using common sense while working with a client that has LESS THAN no common sense, but good grief, that line is getting too thin to skate on in some cases. I am nearly convinced that a particular client may not want to accept a report that includes an insane amount of photos for bogus reasons. Even so, they get their information they were looking for that I may have now "freely provided" at my own expense of a nasty pizza, gas, and childcare. Maybe it is not the editors. Maybe it is the moving target requirements of the client. No matter who you are in the chain, sometimes, "you can't win for losing!"

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/21/2013 04:08AM by amie068.