Mobile phone shop

I have performed dozens of mobile phone shops. When I got this one scheduled, I failed to read it through until the day of the shop. I assumed - wrongly - that I knew the scenario. This one was very different. It required me to photograph all the smartphones in the store window. Then I was to answer questions on every possible smartphone in the store - there were at least 10. Each phone had a list of features on the interview sheet then a follow-up question asking what features were mentioned in addition to the list in the previous question. There were almost 100 questions - specific, data-driven questions. I tried to rewrite the 39 pages of instructions into a cheat sheet and got it down to about 10 pages. I was sure I would be spotted performing this shop.

Bottom line. The shop paid $15.

I canceled the shop. It was inappropriate to ask a casual shopper for a casual amount of money to perform a shop that required a doctoral degree in smartphones.

What do you think??

sail2sunset
Delray Beach FL

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I'm with you on that. It's not reasonable to expect someone to remember all those details. That shop is a good candidate for video, but then again, they would have to pay the video rates

Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It's not pie.
"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag." -Molly Ivins
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of your time and it really annoys the pig.

I think I would not have done that shop for $15.00. I'm with you. Anything that unreasonable ought to be canceled.

Mary Davis Nowell. Based close to Fort Worth. Shopping Interstate 20 east and west, Interstate 35 north and south.

I was looking for some shops to do when I go to "the city" Thursday and I found one that was appealing until I looked at all the hoops they wanted me to jump through for $10. No thanks. some of these MSC's are insane (or we are, for taking the shops anyway) to think anyone would spend a couple hours at the site and another hour and a half filling out a 40 page questionnaire for $10 or $15.

Good thing you looked before you leaped.

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I pray it does not occur that the last thing I did before I died was vacuum the house or eat broccoli.

TOTALLY agree.......just cancelled one myself.....

I could not agree more. $15 is an appropriate fee for talking with a store associate, collecting information and recommendations, noting store layout, etc. What you're talking about should have been scheduled as a full-fledged, revealed audit - for much more than $15. Kudos for taking a stand.

When I was a new shopper, I accepted what I thought was going to be a simple sandwich shop at a nearby military base. By the way, it had been posted as a "quick and easy" assignment. I went to print the instructions without checking the preview info, and over 30 pages later, I had in my hand one of the most incoherent documents I have come across in all of my mystery shopping to date. Every other paragraph was either bolded in red, highlighted in yellow, typed in all caps, typed in oversized type, typed in a different font, and/or underlined. It was a bloody mess, and impossible to tell which elements were truly emphasized. The lengthy requirements for the minimal fee were ridiculous. I immediately tried to cancel. For days, the scheduler sent me nasty emails. The whole thing was ridiculously annoying and insane.

_____________________________________________________________________________
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
~Viktor Frankl

Care to share the MSC? It would be helpful. You are not mentioning a client.

I feel somewhat hesitant in mentioning the MSC as circumstances have changed - for the better. After a year of avoiding this company like the plague, another representative of their company reached out to me. She had come across the correspondence between myself and the scheduler, and was appalled by the scheduler's behavior. She assured me this person no longer worked for the MSC, and asked me to give the company another try. I did, and the few assignments I have completed since then have gone acceptably well. The paperwork is still overly lengthy - probably because they do so much work on military bases - but it is not incoherent and unprofessional. The majority of the fees are pretty low, but once in a while an assignment pops up that has a surprisingly decent fee.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2012 01:48AM by shopgal.

I do quite a few phone jobs. When I have to memorise a lot of promotional stuff on display, I just mumble into a tape recorder stuffed down my bra so I can forget about giving myself a headache tring to remember all the models advertised. If that is not possible, I just ask about them to staff so that gets recorded in 'plain site' - so to speak - as a memory exercise only and then move onto the brief. Works wonders. I must admit, I would junk the job described by Sail2sunset if it involved that much work.

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