(For an update and a differnt opinion from a professional mystery shopper visit Mystery Shopping Revisited.)
I arrived home to find a message from Judy of the mystery shopper service I had applied to a couple months ago. "We have a mystery shopping assignment in your area and we would like you to participate". My first thought was hey this is cool -- I'll get some free merchandise and get paid for just shopping
The first thing I discovered is that these people are always in a hurry. They wanted to get the paperwork to me, have me sign and return a confidentiality agreement do the shopping, fill out the paper work and have it back to them in less than a week.
Next I found that I wouldn't be getting any free merchandise with this assignment. I was to go shopping for tires and get estimates then return my findings to the research firm. They told me I would be paid $20 for each location and they had three locations in my area. That didn't sound too bad. I'd be paid $60 for visiting three tire stores.
I then found out that what was described as "my area" was a little farther than I would have defined. The first one was a 20 minute drive the second one a 45 minute drive and the third one was an hour and a half away. I told the representative that the third one was too far for me. She pleaded a while and then finally offered to pay me an extra $20 to do it. I'm a nice guy so I reluctantly agreed.
All went smoothly and I earned my cool $80 for the assignment. Let's see how much I made per hour. I had about five hours of driving time, one hour dealing with the sales people (20 minutes each), and about two hours total doing the paperwork. That comes to eight hours of work. I drove about 200 miles total and if it costs me 20 cents a mile that works out to $40. Taking all that into consideration I made about $5 an hour for the job.
In other words don't believe the people that tell you you can make $60 an hour as a mystery shopper. Sure, I was paid $80 and only shopped for about an hour, but that was not where most of the time was spent. If you have plenty of time and can use a little extra cash it's great, but you won't get rich mystery shopping.
Mystery shopper -- Solving the Mystery, you may be led to believe that mystery shopping is more rewarding than it really is. You can check out this page for more of the details of what in the world is a mystery shopper.
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