@spicy1 wrote:
Poor things, I feel so bad for you all. I hope this company suffers the same fate. I think it should be that you get paid per every, say, 100 prices, in increments of 100, or something fair.
I mean, what is the point of checking the prices when you can check them online. Does .02 cents really make that much of a difference in competition that you have to put people in complete danger? Who, exactly, is paying for this crap anyway?
In answer to your question about who is paying for this, it is apparently the U.S. government. Below is a portion of an article that explains the price study. As a military retiree who frequents the commissary, it saddens me to see the waste of money on this study. I doubt the information gathered will be of any use as I read about the struggles of mystery shoppers to comply with this study.
"The government is constantly looking at ways to save money and each year the commissary budget comes into question. How can they cut the $1.4 billion commissary budget? Over the years many ideas have been presented, from privatizing the commissary to creating a private brand or even using variable pricing.
The government has finally decided to do something more progressive and hired an outside firm to study ways to save money. These cost-cutting studies will cost the commissary nearly $4 million.
The Defense Authorization Act gave the DoD the responsibility of determining how to save the government money by cutting the commissary budget. The Department of Defense contracted XXXXXX to conduct 2 studies in order to determine exactly how to cut the Defense Commissary Agency (DECA) budget. These two studies cost nearly $4 million and yes, that came out of the commissary budget.
The Defense Commissary Agency says that customers save on average 30 percent compared to civilian grocery stores based on their own research. The government doesn’t want to just take their word for it however. XXXXXXX is now creating a methodology to determine price comparisons.
The Defense Authorization Act gave the Department of Defense the ability to test some of these money-saving options out, such as variable pricing. Variable pricing would mean pricing products differently across the country based off the price in the market. Products in the north typically cost more than some in the south. That means families in some parts of the country will be spending more on groceries than others."
Here's the actual link but I'm not sure it will work for you. I have a problem with the link on Internet Explorer but it seems to load ok with Firefox:
[
militaryshoppers.com]
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2016 04:11PM by kenasch.