shopperbob Wrote:
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> I completely disagree with Elcarv. In business, one's self-esteem and attitude are far more
> important for success than a paltry fee. My experiences with the editors of this MSC are
> mostly negative. I no longer will accept a phone shop through them due to being pestered after
> completion. Ditto for auto, video and senior facility assignments. Such is the prerogative of
> an independent contractor.
Shopperbob –
I really like your posts on this Forum. You offer consistent reflections that apparently proceed from an appreciation for a free market business perspective, one that recognizes the freedom of MSCs to establish and maintain their standards, yet where IC’s have the freedom to shop or not to shop when, where, for whom, and for how much they deem right for themselves.
Thanks for posting to disagree concerning ratings as it highlights a significant plateau that I needed to move beyond in order for me to keep growing my MS'ing income.
In considering an MSC, should its system of ratings affect a shopper’s willingness to shop for them? Each IC needs to answer that for themselves. It was, in fact, IntelliShop that brought the concern to a head for me. In one of my first five shops for them I received an 8 for a shop where the only criticism was that I had not placed double line-breaks in between paragraphs (who knew?!). On the other four shops, all for the same client, I followed the same format for all four in my reporting. The two weekend shops received 10’s, the two weekday shops received 8’s. The 10’s came with a thank-you note from one editor, the 8’s came from a different editor who wanted more details so the reports would “pop” when the comments were read (hard for me to make anything “pop” for a plain vanilla $7 convenience store visit).
I was absolutely scandalized and brooded for weeks about the 8’s. At that point I had two years of MS’ing under my belt and had never received anything less than a perfect score for any company. I determined that I would never shop for Intelli again. I didn’t know that I could “deactivate” myself or else I surely would have. In time I saw other shops with 'telli that I would have liked to take, but didn’t. Then I found this Forum and realized I wasn’t alone in experiencing Intelli’s scattershot system of ratings. Through this Forum I then connected with dozens more MSC’s, which inevitably led to a couple others that have subjective ratings systems (subjective here meaning editor-specific).
I found peace with it all, and am back to happily shopping for IntelliShop (giving consideration to editors’ comments but simply ignoring their scores), by realizing that their scores are not reflective of me. They don’t know me, they don’t care to know me, their scores have no correlation to my worth as a person, and, so far, neither do they to my worth as a shopper. No matter the scores, I have never been hindered from receiving new shops, and for every shop that I have completed I have always been fully paid. There, for me, is half of my worth as a shopper. The other half is the level of integrity to which I hold myself in my shopping. I am an honest and dependable shopper, and I find value in that. This for me has the greater effect on my self-esteem as an IC.
Particularly since the OP was contemplating deactivating over a single unjust “8” after 115 evaluations that were acceptable to the OP, with the attendant implication that the OP was throwing away the income that another 115 shops would generate, I’d have to say the OP was about to cut off the OP's her nose to spite the OP's face. The 8 is in no way reflective of the OP's worth as a person or as a shopper, and it is not a valid indication of even a stranger’s estimation of the OP. It’s a number that a stranger assigned to the OP's report (unjustly, to be sure), but for which the OP is still being paid in full.
I look forward either to continuing a conversation in this thread or to reading your next post elsewhere championing the benefits of free market dynamics within the realm of MS'ing enterprise.
<edited for grammar (and brevity... ha! ) >
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2013 01:05AM by elcarev68.