Greetings,
Can the PURPOSE of those under-cover Audit/Counting mystery Shops be explained to me please..?
Several companies for years now have sent me out to Count/Match/Audit stores.
Most say, "It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes".
One admitted that, "Shop may take up to 3 hours".
You have to go through hundreds of items, match up the Exact UPC bar-code numbers, then verify the price! Oh my gosh, it took me 2 days! I couldn't believe the employees were so nice to me for 8 hours straight!

The grocery Audit shops required that I get a close match to the UPC numbers, but had to get the EXACT price, to the penny, of dozens of items, or they wouldn't pay.
This was fine, except that the store didn't carry a single item on the list!
I was there 3 hours, searching shelves, the back-room, the pharmacy! Even though I was to remain anonymous, I enlisted employees to help me. They couldn't find anything either...

Okay, then I had to search for dozens of wines...
There must have been THOUSANDS of bottles of wines! Non-alphabetized, some refrigerated, some in fancy boxes, hundreds on shelves...
When I looked at those wall-to-wall wine bottles, after picking my jaw up off the floor, I ran out of there..!

Are they trying to find some sort of math genius, or photographic memories?
What is with the physically-IMPOSSIBLE 'under-cover' Audit/Counting Shops..?!?
-ay-

I have done a couple of the ones at Sears and KMart that weren't too bad. I got to pick the items randomly around the store in categories to check and make sure that the pricing was correct on the scanner and signage and advertising. Not a whole lot of fun, but it wasn't noxious.

As far as secretly finding the UPC, price, etc on 30-100 items in a store, no thanks. Shops need to have some modicum of enjoyment involved and those have none that I can perceive.

I did an audit once for $15 that took 3 hours. Boy, was I naive! Now I will only do one if they are offering a HUGE bonus, and that doesn't happen often.