Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Mystery Shopping - shop till you drop


Love shopping, but groan each time your credit card statement reaches you on a sunny day, causing you to storm out of the room in a huff?
Love the crackle of new shopping bags, full of your favorite goods—clothes, footwear, bags, trinkets, cosmetics, fumes, but are often at a loss explaining to your folks / yourself why you just needed to buy that fourth white bag?
Love eating out at the newest restobars in town, but fear you will be dipping into your pockets a lil’ too much?
Movies excite you—and given a chance, you would not miss any new good flick for words?
Well then, mystery shopping is ideal for you, as it actually pays you to shop.
It’s a pretty neat actually—you go to a selected shop(not selected by you silly—the Company that is paying you to mystery shop), purchase some item(s), assess the performance of the customer care executives / shop assistants in the shop, pick the goods, fill out a form(with your observations), scan a copy of he cash memo, and within a fortnight or so, the money that you’d spent on the purchase is refunded to you.
Now if that isn’t cool, pray, tell me, what is?
Apparently quite a few companies like Bare Associates, Omnitouch India, Shaw Consultancy Services, and RAMMS India pay you to shop, assess / rate / gauge the performance of shops, restaurants, theaters, etc. Their funda is service evaluations and finding out if these so-called customer-assured services publicized by these shops have an element of truth in them, or do they just ring hollow? Whatever is the case, this relatively new concept is fast catching on, and that comes as good news indeed for shopaholics like my friends and me.

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