Issue Seventy Six

Research Services Group

Research Services Group is the mystery shopping division of Mystery Researchers. Their website defines the company as a “business intelligence provider” which, in addition to mystery shopping, also provides audits and standards compliance inspections, online and phone surveys, pricing evaluations and app performance testing. Mystery Researchers started out as a home-based business in 2008 and…

Gas Station / Convenience Store Audits

There are several different types of gas station/convenience store audits, and they can be broken down into basically two types, revealed and unrevealed. Both require at least one purchase, although the revealed audits usually require two purchases; one of gasoline, and one of an item from the convenience store. Having an economy car, it becomes…

The Grumbling Shopper.

There are many, many discussions at MysteryShopForum grumbling about scoring by one particular mystery shopping company(MSC), and other discussions grumbling about the amount of narrative required for some shops. Sometimes we get both topics in the same thread, grumbling about the amount of narrative required for some shops by that particular MSC with the fussy…

Accepting Challening Assignments

At what point should we turn down a mystery shop because some aspect of it is beyond our capabilities? There was a recent discussion on www.mysteryshopforum.com about a shopper who was asked to do a shop that included evaluating a golf course at a resort. The shopper stated on the forum that, “The description did…