I have been working as a full time mystery shopper since 2006 and I have been witnessing how this Industry is getting slowly degenerated.
As all of you know, every year is more expensive to live. Gas goes up and so everything else goes up. How about the fees for our hard work? Those go down!!! Big companies like Intellishop are exploiting and destroying our industry. As we all now, due the Economic diffuclites our Country is going through, hundres of new shoppers sign up every day. Intellishop and other companies are taking advantage of this and devaluing the work.
During 2012, Intellishop gained several new clients and cut the fees almost in half. This proves how much companies like Intellishop care nothing about the Industry but only care about how to exploit more their shoppers and make more money. One of the most frustrating moves I have ever seen was the following:
---- Better Business Solutions had valet/self-park shops. Valet shops paid $21 and self-park paid $18 plus the obvious reimbursement for parking. The requirement was to stay 20 minutes (for both valet and self-park) Questionnaire was okay, very decent.
---- BBS looses this client. Guess who has it? Intellishop! Now these shop pay $10 for self and $12 for valet. The questionnaire is exactly the same, but with the additional change of having to stay 30 minutes! Pay gets almost cut in half and you are required to spend 50% more time...
Now what am I going to do? Maybe I should go ahead and call my cable company. I will request extra TV and extra Internet speed, but I will pay them half of what my bill is now. They should't complain, should they?
Intellishop, The Slayer did this with more clients.
Now, we have the other side of the coin... the companies that slowly destroys you. They rarely change clients, their shops are pretty much the same and they are a decent company overall... with one problem. The slowly dock their fees. Market Force is also in the same group.
This morning, I was going to grab a few cell phone shops with Measure. When I log on their site, I notice how the shops went from paying $11 to paying $10. One buck docked from fee, but same requirements. However, when I went to pump gas, I paid $3 more than last year early January (yes, I keep track) Of course, same shops, same locations and same requirements... pretty much the same work and drive for less money.
Why do companies do this? Because they know that many people needs Mystery Shopping for a living these days, at least, as a side income, but necessary. They know that people will shop anyways if they decrease their fees.
This is pretty pathetic and I am so uninspired to write. I had several versions of this post, as well as other thoughts, but I am feeling so uninspired that I do not even know what to write or how to write it well... not even willing to review this very post for grammar/spelling errors... I am seeing how this Industry is getting slowly destroyed... not because only of how the fees are getting docked to the ground, but for many many more reasons (that I wrote about and then erased due lack of inpiration)
What do you guys think?
My only hopes rest on Video shopping. Something I have been doing since 2011, where companies do value the shopper a lot and fees are very decent. Hopefulyl more and more clients will awakened and move from paper shops to video shops... And greedy companies like Intellishop wont be able to ruin it since only a fraction of the Mystery Shopping population do work with videos.