Recently, I realized that my odd and boring youth is helpful to me now. When in music performance many lifetimes ago, I was taught to grab a phrase and look up. The conductor said it was okay to end the phrase with a preposition, haha. Recently, I was checking a location for certain items and I realized that I was doing the same task, without a conductor and sheet music. It was like second nature to me, and it made the task very efficient and very effective. It was very weird, but very useful.

What weirdness from your past makes you the great shopper you are today?

Having grown up in a clothing family, my uncle manufactured woman's coats and suits, with my sister working for Saks for over 50 years. We got to know good well made clothes (not stuff made in China as today). Couture clothes were made in Italy, Paris, fitting like a glove. This gave me experience to shop high end stores. I feel comfortable and these are my favorites.These skills trained when you are a child, never leave.

I'm currently in orchestral performance and it definitely applies! I've learned how to really "sell a story" even if my guidelines aren't well-written (i.e. poorly written compositions).

Also, how to pace and use time effectively, while not exclusive to music professions, definitely applies here. That, and practice, practice, practice. Practicing is an art. Music performance teaches effective practice.

@bcm2016 wrote:

I'm currently in orchestral performance and it definitely applies! I've learned how to really "sell a story" even if my guidelines aren't well-written (i.e. poorly written compositions).

Also, how to pace and use time effectively, while not exclusive to music professions, definitely applies here. That, and practice, practice, practice. Practicing is an art. Music performance teaches effective practice.

I agree, my daughter had 9 years of classical piano, and it taught her many traits she uses in her profession,
like you said, practice, and she still plays, now in a Latin jazz band for fun. These lessons have paid off in her
adult life. Lessons learned as a child stick with you.

@CoatClosetCommando wrote:

@Irene_L.A. wrote:

Having grown up in a clothing family, my uncle manufactured woman's coats and suits, with my sister working for Saks for over 50 years. We got to know good well made clothes (not stuff made in China as today). Couture clothes were made in Italy, Paris, fitting like a glove. This gave me experience to shop high end stores. I feel comfortable and these are my favorites.These skills trained when you are a child, never leave.

Are the couture clothes more form-fitting (tight) like the designer ones made in Italy?

Go to Saks Fifth Ave and see for yourself...they are certainly classic.

Interesting points. When I was a scheduler, I noted that people from the arts often were the best performers as new mystery shoppers. I always attributed that to them being accustomed to working hard for very little pay.

The same concept works conversely, BTW. My business outside of MSing has become much more successful since I became a shopper, as it forced me to utilize technology for for organizing and running my business.

Working in the medical field helped me with observations which has been helpful in mystery shopping. I can remember names and descriptions easily. It was also useful for understanding the language of mystery shopping.

MSing definitely helps with detail. My ex fell and cracked his head (10 stiche's) and lost his expensive ear plugs (whatever). I noticed them tangled in his hair, no the ambulance guys and the other 5 people around couldn't find them. I saw them, thanks MS, saved him a grand. Karma's a b____kidding, we're friends, I go to him for financial advice, he has his degree in finance.....no, sorry, I do not take that advice from anyone on the forum, no offense.



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@SteveSoCal wrote:

Interesting points. When I was a scheduler, I noted that people from the arts often were the best performers as new mystery shoppers. I always attributed that to them being accustomed to working hard for very little pay.

This may be related, but it's likely also the fact that we have to literally be perfect in order to have a good performance. So most of us are extremely conscientious about even the smallest mistakes. There was a really interesting presentation that a music educator did on a similar subject to the parents of some state's all-state music education conference, but unfortunately I can't find it.

The gist of the presentation was that music requires a lot more perfection than many other fields. To cite an example, in school, a grade of 95% is considered generally to be a really good grade, but in music, if you miss 5% of the notes, the performance is downright awful. At the professional level, if you play a wrong note in a job audition, you get eliminated from the round. And of course, notes and rhythms are just the basics. Even if you're downright technically perfect, there are probably a bunch of other conservatory-trained auditionees that played the repertoire for the audition more musically than you did, so you still get eliminated. And that's just the process of landing an orchestral job. There have been conductors with top-tier orchestras that have fired people for playing a single wrong note in rehearsal (although generally in the professional world, it's understood that there will be mistakes and that basically nobody is perfect all the time).

We have a really brutal situation in orchestras right now where the boards of the orchestras are corporate-types who are extremely money-motivated, and oftentimes, they'll have a job audition but won't hire anyone at all (and everyone knows that it's because they don't want to pay for benefits, not because there aren't a TON of qualified conservatory grads out there). Probably, the competition factor carries over to mystery shopping too-- we're painfully aware that whenever we can do something well, someone else can do it way better. As a result, it's in our best interests to be as reliable as possible for schedulers, as clean as possible for the editors, and make the reports as useful to the client company as possible. If they think someone else can do it better, or if the shop report isn't worth a given amount of money, they'll start getting stingy about shop fees or prefer other shoppers.

True story how mystery shopping has affected my life. This week we had a chili contest at work. One crockpot was overflowing as it was heating up. Someone asked who's crock pot it was and I looked at it and said "Is that a vegetarian one? Then it is Amrish's. He has a plastic bowl in the frig that is in a white canvas bag with red trim. We can put some of it back in that bowl." Mind you, I had seen this guy in the lunchroom over an hour and a half ago for 5 seconds while I put sugar in my coffee. My subconscious mind recorded these details and I was suddenly able to spit them out. I was amazed at myself since I wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing but somehow my brain recorded it and retrieved detailed information.

I have an interest in cell phones. I follow Apple the most, and I have a flagship Android phone. It makes cell shops easy.

My SO works in a grocery store. Grocery shops of any kind are easy, both because he can tell me where anything is, and he doesn't want to spend any more time in a store than he has to. So I do most of the grocery shopping, aside from our one big shopping trip.

Being a wife has helped me in mystery shopping. I'm very good at playing the dumb housewife who tells the overbearing salesperson, "I'll have to check with my husband first."

@DareWright wrote:

Being a wife has helped me in mystery shopping. I'm very good at playing the dumb housewife who tells the overbearing salesperson, "I'll have to check with my husband first."

Gee, my standard response to a salesperson is I have to check with my wife first.

@kenasch wrote:

Gee, my standard response to a salesperson is I have to check with my wife first.

Exactly the same here. It's easy to defer to someone who isn't there.

I have always been able to remember things that other people don't. Such as birthdays of kids I went to grammer school with back in the 80's and I'm not in contact with and even without facebook etc. I can also remember old phone numbers of certain people. There are dates I can remember others can't, my friends and family like to goof around with me about how strange it is that I have all this just stuck in my brain. This helps me to remember details of different things I need to know. One other thing is making up the stories of wanting a product and then playing the dumb housewife. I bring my daughter with sometimes when she's home from school and she'll ask me are you really thinking about buying ......? I'll tell her no that was just what I needed to ask about. She laughs and says you're getting so good at it that I don't know when you're for real or not anymore. LOL!

Endurance with morons.

Typing is definitely my transferable skill. I transcribed for a while for extra cash.

Per long distance, I can type around 100 to 110 WPM for extended periods of time. I have clocked one minute speed rounds of close to 140 but that's a single 60 second speed round. There are some who can type over 200 words in a speed round. CRAZINESS. You Tube has a video of one guy doing 217 B34JI-2fBZk WMP in the speed round. There was a ill tempered person on here a while back with nasty comments about my typing but I find that my transcription skills can help me knock out reports much faster than some. If I sit down and hit 100 WPM for a half hour, I can knock out some of the reports that would take others three hours.

I was in journalism and worked for a major news network for almost 20 years, and I find that the observational skills and the ability to write objectively transfer over very well.

There is a university (I can't remember which) where the professor fakes an altercation and the students think it's real. The professor then asks them to recall facts from the incident and the students pretty much flunk. It's meant to prove that eyewitness testimony cannot be as reliable as we think it would be (especially with adrenaline pumping!)

I read that of the students, musicians tend to remember what was said with greater accuracy. I think it's because we are auditory learners

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There's also some neat research that shows that you can influence testimony with words. Besides eye witness testimony sucking... you can let 100 people watch two cars hit one another at 35mph but depending on if you use the word slam, crash, careen, and so forth their answers may be different as to how fast the cars were going and how bad the accident was.

Before ms'ing, hubby and I worked as IC's for a publishing company selling advertising in a directory for RVers. We also had to inspect and rate RV parks and campgrounds. The selling part taught me to know when a salesperson is doing a good job or needs more training and the inspecting taught me to observe everything including the tiny details that most people never notice.

I know that MSing has helped increase my memory of details which helped 1) to catch a thief I saw for just a moment one morning outside that was running by. The cops showed me about ten different pictures of similar suspects - and I chose the correct one repeatedly....even though I only saw him for a split second. 2) It REALLY helps me when I am trying to put together all of my coupon "deals" from various companies like Ibotta or Checkout 51. (PM me if you want to be on my Ibotta team). Yesterday I put together all of my deals and remembered nearly all of the 35 different products to get based upon my Ibotta and manufacturer's coupons.