It
turns out there is such thing as a free lunch. All you have to do is
use your iPhone to time how long it takes for a server to deliver an
appetizer. Or carefully observe a bartender to see if he is pouring free
drinks. It’s all in a day’s work for a mystery shopper—someone hired to
secretly measure quality of service, compliance with regulations, and
more.
Perhaps, like me, the last time
you heard of mystery or secret shoppers was in the 1990s, but the
industry is apparently still thriving. The Mystery Shoppers Providers
Association Americas (MSPA) values the industry at $1.5 billion and
estimates that there are 1.5 million mystery shoppers across diverse
industries worldwide.
District resident Matt Stern
is one of them. He’s been a mystery shopper for about 20 different
companies, but he recently signed on with D.C.-based Blink Research,
which debuted in July 2016. “It’s fun,” Stern says. “I get free meals.
It’s like being a spy in D.C.—no one knows what you’re doing. You feel
like you’re doing something wrong, but it’s right.”
Blink Research is a one-man shop headed by founder Marc Ciagne, a Washingtonian for 25 years whose earliest jobs were in the restaurant industry, including stops at La Tomate in Dupont Circle and the long-gone American Café in Georgetown. He went on to work for AOL and Consumer’s Checkbook before moving to Person to Person Quality based in Northern Virginia.
There,
Ciagne grew the mystery shopping side of the business for 12 years as
managing director. In June 2016 he decided to strike out on his own and
focus on his passion—restaurants. So far, Ciagne has worked with eight
food clients with a combined 37 locations, most in greater Washington.
He’s also amassed a database of 1,700 mystery shoppers, including 500 in
the immediate area, and 195 people have completed “shops.”
Restaurants
hire Blink Research, agreeing to pay between $50 and $75 per mystery
shopper evaluation, plus meal reimbursement, the latter of which is the
primary compensation for the mystery shopper. “Basically you’re getting a
free meal,” Ciagne explains. “You’re not earning money that will go
into your savings account.”
Mystery
shoppers are considered independent contractors, and the Blink Research
website states that the company is only obligated to send a 1099 tax
form if a mystery shopper earns more than $600 in a year. It’s rare for
shoppers to reach that threshold because reimbursements for expenses or
mileage don’t count towards those earnings.
“Rent
is expensive, so if you can save on food and still enjoy the attraction
of living here in D.C., it’s a win-win-win situation,” Ciagne says.
“The restaurant gets really detailed honest feedback they can use to
improve their business. The mystery shopper gets not only their meal or
drinks reimbursed, but they’re helping a local business in their
community, which should in turn help the whole D.C. economy.”
Blink
Research is very intentional about its shopper outreach. “I try to
bring in young, well-educated customers,” Ciagne says. His strategies
include targeting Facebook advertisements to college graduates between
the ages of 21 and 35. “I’m really impressed with who has signed up,” he
says, adding that he requests to connect with mystery shoppers on
LinkedIn to learn about their backgrounds. “It’s fun to go through and
see this person works for this non-profit, this one’s a teacher, one of
them was a judge.”
The MSPA,
however, recommends including demographically diverse shoppers, which
means considering gender, socio-economics, employment status, and
ethnicity. Many Blink Research clients are in the fast-casual sector, as
opposed to fine dining, meaning they have many diners who aren’t
college graduates.
“They’re not
excluded from registering,” Ciagne says. “They’ll have the same access
to an assignment as everyone else, but at the end of the day, a
well-written report with lots of details will be a lot more useful to my
clients than one that’s poorly done.”
There
are several different kinds of “shops,” and some involve more writing
than others. An alcohol compliance assignment, for example, simply asks
shoppers between the ages of 21 and 28 to order a drink at the bar and
note whether the bartender checks identification.
Others
are more involved, combining yes-or-no questions about whether a
server’s appearance was neat and clean or whether a hostess made eye
contact with more subjective questions that ask for 250 characters or
more on elements like ambiance.
Then
there are tasks that aren’t so straightforward. Some clients want
mystery shoppers to catch bartenders giving away drinks or drinking on
the job. “One way to make extra money as a bartender is to give away
free drinks and collect more money in tips,” Ciagne says. So a mystery
shopper will visit several times to “groom” a bartender to see if he’ll
eventually toss her a gratis gimlet.
Ciagne
admits he gets uncomfortable when a client asks mystery shoppers to set
someone up. After all, mystery shopping should be used for employee
incentive programs, not as a punishing tool for firing staff, according
to MSPA ethics.
“A lot of
people have the misconception that the primary objective is some sort of
policing function when really a big part of it is finding people who
are doing things right, even when management isn’t looking over their
shoulder,” Ciagne says.
That’s precisely how TaKorean,
a Blink Research client that spends about $800 a month on mystery
shops, uses its feedback. “We want to use mystery shoppers to develop
store leaders and everyone else,” says founder & CEO Mike Lenard. “It’s tied to our profit-sharing program—we have bonus programs in place all the way to hourly-level folks.”
TaKorean
also uses mystery shoppers to ensure that staff members relay what
differentiates it from more traditional taco shops. “In a fast casual,
we’re not going to have a person who can describe a dish like you do
sitting down at Kinship,” Lenard says. But he expects them to know that their salsa includes Korean gochujang (fermented chili paste).
Recognizing
talent and rewarding it is critical as local restaurants face a major
talent shortage and heavy turnover. Five hundred new restaurants opened
in the District over the past two years, according to Restaurant
Association of Metropolitan Washington, so water-cooler gossip in
kitchens across town is all about how difficult it is to find and keep
staff.
“Mystery shopping can help with
that too,” Ciagne says. “You want to identify who those people are, you
want to keep them, reward them, and get them into management training
programs if you’re trying to expand.”
Indeed,
restaurants like TaKorean looking to open new locations are ideal Blink
Research clients, according to Ciagne. “You want to take that awesome
customer experience at your first location that made you successful …
and recreate that over and over again, and you don’t do that by winging
it.”
You do it by codifying what builds customer loyalty and retention. And doing that often requires taking a step back.
“One
of the risks of running your own restaurant and being so close to the
action day after day is you don’t have that bird’s-eye view,” Ciagne
explains. Mystery shoppers combat myopia by offering fresh eyes that are
emotionally detached from the restaurant. “Shoppers will notice things
right in plain sight that owners and managers haven’t.”
To
better understand the mystery shopper experience, I registered with
Blink Research and accepted an assignment to have lunch at a
full-service restaurant in Southeast D.C.—but not before I pinged Matt
Stern and another Blink mystery shopper who preferred to remain
anonymous for tricks of the trade.
Stern
tipped me off to mobile apps like “Shop It” to help record data when
dining, while the anonymous Blink Research shopper advised me to
carefully read all the questions before arriving at the restaurant so
they’d be top of mind. “And take notes on your iPhone so it doesn’t look
like you’re filling out a survey,” she adds. Stern had some final words
of assurance. “It’s easy, like writing a story about your dinner—if
something went wrong, it’s easy to remember.”
Off
I went with 93 questions to tackle and a reimbursable lunch budget of
$40 plus a $5 token fee for parking. It wasn’t so different from writing
restaurant reviews except that it was far more exacting. How long did it take before a server greeted you? Sixteen seconds, according to my stopwatch. How soon were your drinks served after ordering them? Just a few minutes.
Stuffed
and back at my computer, it took me 35 minutes to answer the questions,
including several where I was required to scribble at least 250
characters of subjective prose about the meal. So did the amount of work
feel like a fair exchange for a free meal?
Not
quite. While this particular shop reimburses up to $40, it’s almost
impossible to stay under budget and answer all the questions. How was I
to evaluate how much time had passed between appetizers and entrees
without ordering an appetizer? How was I to check if I would be carded
when ordering alcohol without making a boozy purchase? The total bill
for two salads, an order of bread, and two glasses of wine came close to
$100.
Ciagne calls restaurant
mystery shopping “the ultimate side gig,” even equating it to driving
for Uber. It’s a message that should resonate in a city full of
side-hustlers. But the truth is, mystery shopping is more like a fun
hobby than a side job.