Last week I signed up for my very first shop with BARE. I was excited and pleased -- it worked into a route I had, in a city I was going to anyway. Nice bonus. The shop was a testing shop, scheduled for 8 AM. Oops -- first mistake -- they are in a different time zone, which requires me to leave home at
4:30 AM. Well, my mistake -- makes for a long, long day, but the money for the route is good, so I'll do it.

Thursday, Feb. 20, I leave the house at roughly 4:30 AM....make it 20 miles, there's a large flashing sign by the road "CAUTION: Winter Weather Ahead". Now, folks, the sun is still two hours from rising, but as far I can see, the road is clear, no clouds, no wind -- so I just keep going. Twenty miles later, I top a hill -- and run into a no-visibility blizzard, total whiteout -- can't see the road, nothing.

Go about 2 miles in this mess...realize I can't make another 100 miles by 8:00 AM (not at 10 MPH), turn around and come home.

As soon as I get home, I call and/or e-mail every scheduler for every shop I had scheduled. I go to the correct website, and cannot for the life of me figure out how to reschedule this testing shop. Call the scheduler again. And again. And again, getting slightly more stressed with each passing hour she does not respond. Every other company has responded, just not BARE -- all the other shops are rescheduled or cancelled. And, of course, this is my FIRST job for them, and I REALLY don't want to screw it up!

Now, I've put 80 miles on my car and printed out reams of instructions for this shop. Cost of doing business, stuff happens.

Finally I reach the scheduler -- hallelujah, she actually answers her phone! She tells me how to reschedule the shop, and emphasizes the importance of scheduling it during February. I am resistant to that, because the 10 day forecast is more snow -- but we all know how often the forecast is wrong. I reluctantly reschedule for Thursday (today).

Then the snow hits here. It snows Friday. It snows more Saturday. It snows even more on Sunday.
And it's still snowing Monday when I get up. So I again contact all schedulers, and we cancel every shop that had been rescheduled from last week to this week; that may give the schedulers a chance to get another shopper to meet the deadlines. Except BARE. I e-mail, I call; I call again and e-mail again.

Monday afternoon, I get a brief e-mail from the BARE scheduler -- the test shop has been rescheduled, per my request.

OK, sigh of relief! So I'm snowed in. Not going anywhere this week at all. All I have to do is stay warm.

Get up yesterday. What's this? A reminder that I have a shop tomorrow? Nope, sure don't.

Sure enough, I do -- the testing shop, 100 miles from home.

Folks, I have snowdrifts outside my front door deeper than my car is tall! No way am I going ANYWHERE.

So, I call the scheduler. I e-mail her. I call again. And again. Getting a little frantic, I admit. I am a perfectionist, and take great pride in being an excellent shopper -- and I ALWAYS get nervous on a new shop for a new company. Sweating bullets isn't an exaggeration!

Finally, late last night, I get a VERY terse e-mail from the scheduler -- that the shop has been
CANCELLED per my request, with a score of 1/20.

In all honesty, my computer skills aren't terrific -- I had real trouble navigating the site. The directions BARE sent didn't match the website very well (like, they said "click 'next'" and there is
NO 'next' button, stuff like that, which I find confusing and time consuming). But I think my
phone calls and e-mails were clear and understandable.

I'm afraid I wrote a nasty e-mail back, that I was sorry the company found it necessary to punish me for
THEIR lack of communication and failure to respond to my phone calls and e-mails --

Guess I won't be doing any shops for BARE....

Sorry for being so long-winded. I wanted to be clear and concise, and fair; I put my own failings in, as well as BARE's.

Has anybody run into poor communication with this company? How did you resolve it?

cease

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2014 04:54PM by ceasesmith.

Bare is a good company. I would not send a nasty email to any of the shopping companies. Most companies are involved with the MSPA. I would not even attempt to shop 100 miles away in this years weather. These schedulers have hundreds of shoppers to deal with and are on a fixed deadline. " Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"

I have barely worked for Bare; none of their shops appeal to me. But just as a suggestion to you weather-weary Americans, take a picture of the bad roads or the snow drifts or whatever as proof of bad weather. I have done that in hurricane-like weather and flooding situations. I have also sent them screen shots of the weather forecast for the time period that I would have been shopping. I have never had a problem.

shopper8 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Bare is a good company. I would not send a nasty
> email to any of the shopping companies. Most
> companies are involved with the MSPA. I would not
> even attempt to shop 100 miles away in this years
> weather. These schedulers have hundreds of
> shoppers to deal with and are on a fixed deadline.
> " Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"


Well, by "nasty", I didn't mean cursing or anything like that -- I was merely as terse as their
e-mail saying I would get a 1/20. "I'm sorry the company feels that it needs to punish me for
their own failure to respond to my phone calls and e-mails." For me, that's a very nasty e-mail!

That's a good idea about sending a pic of the snow and the uncleared streets. Except I don't
really know how to do that -- send a photo with an e-mail.

Well, I did admit my computer skills aren't that great!



cease

Well, you held the job for a long time... They could have found another shopper who was not 100 miles away...

@ Cease ~ I am not sure how old you are but including photos either in e-mails or as attachments is easy. If you are a parent, have one of your kids show you. If you are a grandparent, have one of the grand kids teach you. It will be a bonding moment for both of you.

While you're at it, have them show you how to resize photos but most e-mail programs will do it automatically.

LindaM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well, you held the job for a long time... They
> could have found another shopper who was not 100
> miles away...

Scheduled Wednesday at 5 PM for Thursday at 8:00 AM; notified them immediately upon return home.
They told me the following Monday they had rescheduled the shop; I found out Wednesday AM that
it was rescheduled for Thursday 2/27 at 8:00 rather than 3/6/ at 11:00 AM.

When I finally did talk to her on the phone, I asked if it would be better to cancel, so that perhaps
they could get another shopper. I was told no, that it would be easy to reschedule, that I would not be penalized, that they really appreciated that I had kept them "in the loop".

So I didn't "hold" the shop.

cease

(And no kids at home; no grandkids close enough. And I have learned that if someone else shows me how to do stuff on their computer, it doesn't work that way on MY computer -- different OS or
something. And so far I have never had to resize a photo for a shop. And I'm 68; my neighbors
are even older, and know less computer stuff than I do.)