Thoughts on this?
eta: I think the thing I hear usually is that they are shops for people who just happen to be driving by a place. Fair enough, but a lot of times no one JUST HAPPENS to be driving to these locations. Instead, we have to intentionally route shops. That takes time. Does anyone pay us for the time it takes to route things - which requires surfing around 10's of MSCs and scoping them out constantly (a big time suck) in the hopes of stringing together three or four shops for a profitable outing? And, then, sometimes you just can't, because you have to compete with other shoppers. So, now, that time has gone to waste with no reimbursement.
Also, I remember a poster who had a post from years ago (I searched the forum for Sonic once and found this old post), who said he had knowledge that we save a lot of companies LOTS of money by working so cheaply for them. They don't have to have their district managers doing this inspection type of work. We even add some things a DM cannot, due to our anonymity.
In the past, they'd have to pay a DM $200,000/year (or something like that) to go around to all the district franchises to inspect them for quality control. On top of salary, they'd have to pay for this DM to fly, drive, live in hotels, eat meals, etc. And the DM is known. A mystery shopper is doing work that is probably worth $100-300/shop sometimes for the company. We are anonymous and can test components that the DM cannot. We use our own gas and car...do our own scheduling...get no health insurance benefits or pension plans, etc.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/2019 04:27AM by shoptastic.