The Mystery Shopper’s Manual

This is a guest post from Elaine Viets, author of the popular Josie Marcus mystery shopper mystery novels. Although mystery shoppers seldom get involved in murder investigations, other aspects of Josie’s life and career will be very familiar to mystery shoppers. Here is Elaine’s story of how she came to write a series of books about mystery shopping, and her personal mystery shopping past.

My mother was a mystery shopper in the mid-1960s. The job helped her escape four noisy kids and earn a little extra money for herself. Mystery shopping was the only work she was allowed outside the home.

It’s hard to understand her world now. The Sixties are seen as a wild time, but they weren’t for traditional blue collar wives. My father was a supervisor for Union Electric in St. Louis. My mom cleaned house and took care of three unruly boys and me. No mom in our neighborhood worked outside the home. …continue reading For Mom and Mrs. Minivan

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Mystery shopping is a lonely business. We work on our own and spend lots of time in front of the computer, looking for assignments and entering reports.

When we do get together with other people, we have to watch what we say so we don’t violate our confidentiality agreements. But it doesn’t really matter, because even if we could talk about what we do, they wouldn’t really understand. Getting paid to shop? That sounds like a pretty cushy gig to most people. …continue reading Networking with Other Secret Shoppers

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Many employees believe they can always spot the mystery shopper. Often the things they think give away the shopper are things that a shopper would never (or at least should never) do.

As shoppers, we are sometimes concerned that be required to ask what we believe are “stupid” questions will give us away. My answer to that is that real customers do dumber things than anything we do. Want proof? Check out this site: http://notalwaysright.com/.

At The Customer is Not Always Right, people who work in sales, tech support, food service and other customer service positions share horror stories of stupid and difficult customers. Anyone who has ever held a job dealing with the public will experience flashes of recognition. As secret shoppers, we have probably observed some of these types of interactions. However, if you see yourself as the customer in any of these stories . . . uh, there may be a problem.

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I recently wrote about a mystery series featuring a mystery shopper as the sleuth. Now, from the UK, comes news that a former mystery shopper has won an important literary award, the Costa First Novel Award.

What Was Lost, Catherine O’Flynn’s novel, won a £5000 prize and is in contention for the £25,000 Costa Book of the Year Award, to be presented January 22, 2008.

O’Flynn says she was inspired to write the mystery novel while working at a shopping center. The story is about a security guard who spots a child on CCTV 20 years after the child went missing.

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I have a new blog that covers subjects other than (or in addition to) mystery shopping. Want to learn about marketing? Get motivated to accomplish more? Check out http://www.CathyStucker.com/

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Josie Marcus is not a typical mystery shopper. Among other things, she makes her living as a full-time mystery shopper while working for just one company. Oh, and she also tends to wind up in the middle of murder investigations. Fortunately, that does not happen to most of us, although it has happened to Josie three times (so far).

…continue reading Mystery Shopper Mysteries

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