Am I the only one who is bothered by emails from schedulers that say things like:
"we need male shoppers" - when my profile states I am a female
"dinner/coffee/movies on me" - no, I have to perform the work to get reimbursed for this service, so it is clearly NOT "on you"
"I need this location shopped by the end of the week" - this passive voice seems to be very rude & rubs me the wrong way

Clearly it is the end of the month and those emails are abundant (I do not mind) but some of those lines are "out of line" in my book.

I can understand the plea for male shoppers. At least in my own personal experiences, the males in my life RARELY ever check their email. It could be a restaurant shop in need of a male shopper, but they can bring a guest. This is where I would receive the email and say "Hey - you need to sign up for this shop so we can go to ____ for dinner." Or maybe it's a haircut or an oil change for a male, and a male in my life has said they've been meaning to get a haircut, or an oil change or whatever the shop is for. I can point the assignment out to them, so they can apply and save some money.

I can also understand the "dinner/coffee/movies on me" statement. That doesn't bother me. I look at that as the scheduler trying to come up with something creative to say about the same shop to get your attention rather than "Movie Shop Available" for the 75th month in a row. It's sort of like the line "Have it Your Way at Burger King" .... Well I like my hamburger buns toasted, and I like jalapeno peppers on my hamburger. What they really mean is they will pick off the stuff you don't like, so you don't have to. It doesn't really mean you can 'have it your way.' But it's creative and catches your attention more than saying "Tell us if you don't want pickles or onions".

I agree with you on the "I need this shopped by the end of the week" line. If that is the subject line then that is unacceptable. However, I don't think that sentence is offensive if it is in the body of the email. If I know I can't shop this week, it is nice to know in advance that the absolute hard deadline cannot be extended. I then wouldn't waste my time emailing the scheduler to tell her I'm interested in helping her out the following week.

I have more things to do than be upset about wording of a canned email I'm not going to read anyway.

Most shoppers heavily rely on those emails.

I've been doing this since 2005. I understand the frustration but I've learned to either just scroll by or include in the delete emails.

I am not bothered by the male thing or the end of the week but I absolutely am bothered by shops that are sent broadcast to the entire country without naming the city or at least the state(s) where these shops are available. If the shop is in Pa and I live in LA 3000 miles away please put PA in the headline so unless I am traveling I do not need to open the email. And speaking of the burger place....I get at least 20 emails for the burger place a day.....really over the top. I know I can turn the emails off but i may be interested in a non burger one.

@sandyf wrote:

I am not bothered by the male thing or the end of the week but I absolutely am bothered by shops that are sent broadcast to the entire country without naming the city or at least the state(s) where these shops are available. If the shop is in Pa and I live in LA 3000 miles away please put PA in the headline so unless I am traveling I do not need to open the email. And speaking of the burger place....I get at least 20 emails for the burger place a day.....really over the top. I know I can turn the emails off but i may be interested in a non burger one.

I turned off those emails because of the burger place early on. I now just make it a point to check the job board regularly on weekdays. I never see anything new on their board on the weekend.

I usually just scan and delete, but I recently got a new ACL scheduler who sent out blasts every day she worked. Between the automatic weekly summary from ACL and all of hers, I could get over a dozen emails for each shop in each location in a week's time... multiplied by all the locations. I finally set up a filter to put her in her own folder that I'll never look at.

@Threemom wrote:

I usually just scan and delete, but I recently got a new ACL scheduler who sent out blasts every day she worked. Between the automatic weekly summary from ACL and all of hers, I could get over a dozen emails for each shop in each location in a week's time... multiplied by all the locations. I finally set up a filter to put her in her own folder that I'll never look at.

Yes! I hate the multiple ACL email blasts. And TEXT messages are the worst! One particular ACL scheduler drove me crazy for months with her text messages. I don't know if she had some limit or problem with sending text messages, if she didn't understand how to use text messaging, or if she just thought she was being cute, but when she sent a short text message about a job, it would take her 5-10 separate text messages. She pressed "send" after every couple of words, resulting in multiple text messages. Instead of "ding!" - check your text messages, I would hear "ding! ding! ding! ding!" I think she must be gone from ACL. I haven't gotten a text from her in some time or seen any emails from her.

@Shops-A-Lot wrote:

I can understand the plea for male shoppers. At least in my own personal experiences, the males in my life RARELY ever check their email. It could be a restaurant shop in need of a male shopper, but they can bring a guest. This is where I would receive the email and say "Hey - you need to sign up for this shop so we can go to ____ for dinner." Or maybe it's a haircut or an oil change for a male, and a male in my life has said they've been meaning to get a haircut, or an oil change or whatever the shop is for. I can point the assignment out to them, so they can apply and save some money.

I can also understand the "dinner/coffee/movies on me" statement. That doesn't bother me. I look at that as the scheduler trying to come up with something creative to say about the same shop to get your attention rather than "Movie Shop Available" for the 75th month in a row. It's sort of like the line "Have it Your Way at Burger King" .... Well I like my hamburger buns toasted, and I like jalapeno peppers on my hamburger. What they really mean is they will pick off the stuff you don't like, so you don't have to. It doesn't really mean you can 'have it your way.' But it's creative and catches your attention more than saying "Tell us if you don't want pickles or onions".

I agree with you on the "I need this shopped by the end of the week" line. If that is the subject line then that is unacceptable. However, I don't think that sentence is offensive if it is in the body of the email. If I know I can't shop this week, it is nice to know in advance that the absolute hard deadline cannot be extended. I then wouldn't waste my time emailing the scheduler to tell her I'm interested in helping her out the following week.

Wow, just wow. EYEROLL

@bgriffin wrote:

I have more things to do than be upset about wording of a canned email I'm not going to read anyway.

You are so above all this, good for you... (sarcasm)

@Vicky86 - This is too funny. You're offended that those scheduler emails "don't" offend me and you throw in an 8th grade eyeroll. Very mature. You asked for opinions on those types of scheduler emails and I simply explained why those types of emails don't bother me.

@Shops-A-Lot wrote:

@Vicky86 - This is too funny. You're offended that those scheduler emails "don't" offend me and you throw in an 8th grade eyeroll. Very mature. You asked for opinions on those types of scheduler emails and I simply explained why those types of emails don't bother me.

I think you misunderstood. You must be quite old to stand by such sexist statement "males rarely check email".

@Vicky86 - I qualified my statement by explaining that I was speaking for the men in my own life.

@Vicky86 wrote:

@bgriffin wrote:

I have more things to do than be upset about wording of a canned email I'm not going to read anyway.

You are so above all this, good for you... (sarcasm)

Yes. I am. And you should be too. That was my point. That attitude is defeatist. If you want to be successful in this business waiting around for canned emails going to 50,000 shoppers for shops and then getting annoyed because you don't like the way it's written, most likely because it did not end in more work for you, is not the way to do it.

Make some contacts and get to the point where the emails you pay attention to are the ones written directly to you by schedulers. Then you can just ignore the canned emails and not care one way or the other how they are worded.

rolls eyes

Have any of you ever worked a corporate job where you get hundreds of emails every single day? Most of which do not apply to you? Have you ever had to schedule time into your day to review and sort email? Have you ever experienced 100 people replying to all with “please don’t reply to all”? Learn to use the tools available in every email platform to auto sort your emails. Google is your friend.

Ya, at one point I didn't like constant emails because the notifications would burn up my battery. Now I like it because I don't have time to search all the boards. I am glad that most of the shops I know better than to sign up for use the same hook line so I can recognize them and skip them as needed.

Be careful. Schedulers are required to send out each individual client to all shoppers within a certain mile radius. It’s unfortunate, but mandatory. You might be missing something!

100% agree.

@TroyHawkins wrote:

Have any of you ever worked a corporate job where you get hundreds of emails every single day? Most of which do not apply to you? Have you ever had to schedule time into your day to review and sort email? Have you ever experienced 100 people replying to all with “please don’t reply to all”? Learn to use the tools available in every email platform to auto sort your emails. Google is your friend.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2018 06:37PM by FLguy65.

@Vicky86 wrote:

Am I the only one who is bothered by emails from schedulers that say things like:
"we need male shoppers" - when my profile states I am a female
"dinner/coffee/movies on me" - no, I have to perform the work to get reimbursed for this service, so it is clearly NOT "on you"
"I need this location shopped by the end of the week" - this passive voice seems to be very rude & rubs me the wrong way

Clearly it is the end of the month and those emails are abundant (I do not mind) but some of those lines are "out of line" in my book.

Most of these emails go out automatically. They do not stop and check the profile for each particular shopper before adding them to the email distribution list. The emails get blasted to everybody who has a profile. The object of this is not to make things easy for each individual mystery shopper and provide just what that shopper wants to see and minimize the amount of time the shopper has to spend on his business. The object is to throw out as many job opportunities to as many potential mystery shoppers as possible to fill the largest volume of shops in the shortest possible amount of time.

Totally agree with TroyHawkins and FLGuy. Those of us with corporate jobs get a tremendous amount of email daily that has nothing to do with us. It goes with the job. If you want to work, this is part of it. If you have a regular job, you learn to live with the emails. If you mystery shop, and the emails get to be too much, you can elect not to receive emails. Delete works just fine for me.

Schedulers are just pawns in the game. Most of them are just ”Clerks.” They have no power to make any decisions. They will tell they must check to see if they can pay you an amount higher than the stated amount for the ”Last minute” shop. They never call you back. Why should they, they are on the phone trying to find someone that will take the low paying job that they have put out as their offer. Please don’t get fooled by the ”Please help me” gig that they email to you. Please help me means a ”Big bonus” added to the set fee that they have put in their email. Don’t get suckered into this. If more mystery shoppers would understand this, the industry would change very quickly. All they are doing with the please help me out is that they are protecting their Full commission status. If you fall for this, they get the full commission and you, the mystery shopper gets screwed again. Just watch the turnover rate of the schedulers. It is astronomical.