Sun, beach and mystery shoppers

The sun, the water, the sand, the men jogging past in shorts and no shirts. Great coffee and terrible tourist coffee. I love St Kilda in pre-summer when it gets cold in the afternoon and the sun sets around 6pm. Thanks Spesh!

I have a mystery shopper job to do on Monday of next week. It is at one of those boutique chain bakeries. I do not do so many mystery shopper jobs because they are usually not worth the time and effort spent on them. But when the novelty outweighs the burden, I'll give it a crack. Part of me wants to redeem myself and have the opportunity to say good things about staff - saying that I empathsize with bullshit corporate bureaucracy that makes secretly catching staff doing something wrong a valid appraisal tool. I also like being on the other side - the customer instead of the employee.

However, I reckon mystery shopping as a strategy is such bullshit - particularly in small shops, manned by less than half a dozen staff. My advice to corporations and Head Office wankers who don't know what it is like to work behind a counter is: get a decent manager, pay them properly, treat them well and let the staff know they are appreciated and then you wouldn't need mystery shoppers to do your job for you. I hate the "catch them doing something wrong" slant to the questionnaires and the focus as a whole.

The amount of money you get as a mystery shopper is ridiculous. I wonder how much the company gets for providing the service. For example: this bakery job - I have to purchase items over $5, more than likely a deal product of $5.95. I will spend 10 mins on getting to the store (which is the most I will spend on travel time nowadays) and 15 minutes checking out the store, entering and being served. I will then spend another 15-25 minutes, after I take another 10 mins to get home, filling out the questionnaire. I get paid altogether $15. This means that I get $9.05 an hour, or if you do not count travel time (cos I suppose since Centrelink expect you to travel to jobs 90 mins away, that the time spent travelling does not count towards your life), it means I get $9.05 for 30-40 minutes of work.

This being said, when I was uber poor, that extra $9-$15 often came in handy for such items as...food. When I was living off a food, travel and entertainment income of $30/week, I mostly only chose food related jobs so I could get fed and get a bit extra. The richest jobs were the real estate ones - $25 for the same amount of time spent. I could buy toothpaste and deodorant then.