I was just looking at a Beyond hello email where it announced their merger with two other companies. There have been other mergers/acquisitions in the last couple of years.

What thoughts do we have about this? Does it strengthen the industry to reduce competition? If the 300-whatever companies we have now merged down to 100-some companies, what will that mean to shoppers? Less signing up, sure. More competition in our area due to more ease of entry for newbies? More money available for shop fees due to each company having less competition for the client's business? Or will they stick the savings/increased fees from the client into their own pockets?

Is this a good thing on a small scale, bad thing if too many companies merged?

anyone else given any thought to what mergers mean in the long run? I saw a frenzy of merger activity years ago in the grocery industry and I don't think it was good for the industry. It gave companies like Wal Mart too much power, enabling them to screw the suppliers and their employees. It eliminated a lot of mom and pop local stores that couldn't compete with companies like Wal Mart.

Will we lose small personal companies to big impersonal automated ones?

Anyone have any ideas about this? Good, bad, indifferent?

I am not sure how this affects the industry, but as I have noticed negative results. The company that I enjoyed a good rapport with has now taken on the negative attributes of one of the other companies that was included in the merger. I am not pleased with that AT ALL. It may be good for the company itself, but it has not been good for the shoppers. There may be a different reaction from a "favored" shopper from the other merged company, but my personal opinion is that it is not good for the shopper.

Too arrive at the answer to the OP's question start with the hypothetical "What would happen if one MSC bought all of the other MSCs, so that there was only one MSC with monopoly powers. There would be no competition for business.

However, this in itself would not impact shoppers, because shoppers compete with each other for the available business.

What will hurt a shoppers income is a recession in the overall economy, or more retirees getting into shopping. Shoppers competing with shoppers for shops is the reason shop fees are low. In a strong economy, where reitirees can really retire and not have to work 2nd jobs out of necessity, there will be fewer shoppers, and the MSC will have to raise fees to attract the remaining shoppers to shops.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/23/2015 05:05PM by schristy33.

I believe most mergers are not good for the shoppers. There are excellent reasons in the two posts above that support my belief. One of the reasons the msc's like mergers is it widens the shopper pool and reduces the need for bonuses.

I know my next comments are not on the discussed topic, but one of my pet peeves is most companies keep adding more requirements, a little here, a little there. Before you know it, you are doing ten additional things with a substantial increase in shop time for the same price.

What happens when airlines or phone companies or cable providers merge? Less competition means higher prices or fewer choices. In the case of MSC's I believe any additional profits will go the the company and not passed on to the shopper and there will be fewer choices for the shopper.

IMHO less competition means that the MSC's can keep the shoppers fees low. Since there will be less MSC's to choose from the shopper will have to take the lower fee or work less.

In this business and what "I" have witnessed, bigger is NEVER better!

When the banking industry mergers occurred in the 90's lots of small banks went under as they could not compete. This led to customer's paying higher fees due to limited options. In the mystery shopping industry I think larger entities equals lower fees and bonuses but that is only my opinion.

Just a note to point out that 100 MSCs should still be quite enough so that they are competing with one another for clients, so we would hardly have a monopoly or an olagopoly.

There may be some loss of scheduler jobs involved with mergers. However, there are only so many hours in a scheduler's day, so I expect those losses to be small, assuming the total volume of shops is steady. Scheduler pay may be squeezed by mergers somewhat more than shopper fees. When MSCs merge their shopper lists, they may be in a better position to pick and choose the top shoppers from the merged list, rather than trying to squeeze shopper pay. Why? Because the top shoppers will flee to better paid shops.

Finally, traditional MSCs are really starting to feel the heat from video shop competition, and there is still a shortage of trained, experienced and reliable video shoppers even in shopper saturated markets like Florida in the winter months! I have just done 3 weeks of video in Florida and could easily have stayed longer and done more without really infringing on my Florida colleagues' video opportunities! Considering that FL is a "two party state" that's saying a lot about the volume of recorded shops being done here. This tells me that video growth in other two party states is just getting started on a growth curve.

So, mergers? Important, but watch more for institutional changes in the industry to be the bigger factor in the next decade. Simple shops may just go digital (Smartphone) and complex/long format shops go recorded, with little left in the middle that we would recognize as "traditional written" shops.

Resistance.... is.... futile. You.... will be.... assimilated.

@DRJ wrote:

Resistance.... is.... futile. You.... will be.... assimilated.

Wasn't that a Star Trek episode. I believe the assimilator was named Landrew.