@mystery2me wrote:
I am still failing to see the big difference...
I honestly don't see a correlation between extending shop windows and shop pay.
I see the way you are looking at this, but I don’t think it’s that simple, and I don’t think it’s just about extended shopping windows only.
I think the iShopFirst idea is also about encouraging shoppers to more strongly compete against each other. If it wasn’t why call it iShopFirst, why put it in the email “Are you going to be first?” with a little man running in the title of the email? Why does it matter if you are the first to get to a location? What’s wrong with just taking your sweet little time? What’s it to them? These things are intentional.
They didn’t call it something like “Flex-Time Scheduling”, or “Enhanced Self-Assign” and say that we’ve been listening to our shoppers, and appreciate the work that you do, and just wanted to try to make things easier for you by giving you a whole month to get work done on not just some of our programs, but on all of our programs. That we understand some people work full time jobs, are students, or are single parents, or have all sorts of things going on in their life, and just wanted to do something to make things easier for our shoppers because we can, and thought we should. We realize that without you shoppers, we don’t have a business, and we just wanted to do this for you guys just to be nice. Did they say anything like that? No, because it’s not their intention. Their intentions aren’t about considering our well-being, or showing appreciation. It’s about their bottomline.
They want us to rush out, and get work done before the other guy, and just forget about the incentives that might come later on. And this will probably work because a lot of people rather make something than nothing. Especially if they are trying to survive off of this work.
@mystery2me wrote:
The new programs looks more like the old Maritz system than anything elses, where shoppers could self-assign further in advance and end-of-month bonuses were actually better.
Yeah, it’s starting to become that way, with the shopping windows, but it hasn’t always been that way.
It use to be that all Maritz programs were all on the Maritz Legacy Website. Then IPOS took over, and a decision was made to discontinue the use of that website. In it’s place, some programs were put on the Sassie platform, some on the Shopmetrics platform, and some on the Presto platform. The one that they put on the Presto platform, did not have extended shopping windows when it was first launched. When that program was first launched on Presto, you had maybe 20 or 24 hours in which to get everything done.
And as someone that tracks this, I can tell you that the incentives for that program were at their highest during the first quarter in which it was launched on the Presto platform. After that, they appeared to be experimenting the idea of extended shopping windows, and the incentive numbers went down each subsequent quarter. So I think there is a correlation based on what I saw with that one program.
Were there other factors involved? Yes, I believe so. I believe there were increased levels of competition each subsequent quarter that resulted in the work getting done much more quickly, and also IPOS management reducing the incentive amounts for any work that did not get done early on. For example, for the previous quarter, if a location wasn’t done by week 8 into the cycle, maybe it got a $20 incentive added to it. Next quarter, if the same thing happens again at week 8, then maybe the incentive amount is $10 this time, and so on. So those things I believe have been lowering the pay as well. Fewer incentive locations, and lower incentive amounts.
But how does that relate to extended shopping windows? Well, if people are encouraged to be more competitive with one another, and instead of taking 10 shops at a time, like they did with that program on Presto, and they start taking 100 shops or more at a time. Then that’s is going to be that many more shops getting done at the lowest pay rate because they don’t give deadline based incentives early on. So that would be the correlation I think. More shops getting done sooner, because people are desperate to get to them before the other guy, means fewer shops needing to get done later, and therefore less deadline based incentives later. At least for that one program on Presto anyway.
So for some programs, maybe this makes no real difference because that’s how it was before. But for this one program on Presto, at least, I think it does make a difference. For that first month on the one Presto program, I think you’re going to have a lot of hoarding, and that it’s going to work towards IPOS’s benefit because the work will ultimately get done for less. And I don’t think flakes are going to affect that.
@mystery2me wrote:
This doesn't mean shop pay won't keep going down, but I think that would be more a result of other pressures...
As for macro-economic factors playing into this, I don’t think that’s really the case too much here. I think it’s the policies that IPOS management sets, like this iShopFirst idea, and them trying to goad one shopper into taking another shopper's work, that determines our pay more than it is any single other thing.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2021 11:42PM by Curious99.