I just got picked to be a "secret customer" at a steakhouse in Wausau!!!

[TheMightyFavog]

Mmmmmmm.... steak..... It'll be leaps and bounds ahead of the shit at the DeBot Center.

Plus,I'll be asked to evaluate the people manning the bar! :beer:

[aquart]

1. How does this work and why is it wonderful?

[Pithlet]

2. Cool! I've always wanted to do that.

With my background in retail I think I'd be good at it, and it would be fun. Getting paid to shop or eat at restaurants. Great gig. :)

[TheMightyFavog]

5. The boyfriend of one of the girls living in our dorm is...

one of the head managers there, he was hired two weeks ago as part of a team to help with the restauraunt's transition to new managment.

[da_chimperor]

3. I don't like secret customers

I worked at kinko's for a year. They'd come in at a random time once a month to check on things. They'd always come in and buy a pen, or 5 copies of something random. Not to hard to spot if you knew what to look for and kept your eyes open. Still, we all got crap from management about acting like the secret customer was in the store at all times. NOT fun.

Oh yeah, congrats on the free steak!

[Xithras]

4. I was a "secret shopper" for Taco Bell when I was younger.

The pay wasn't bad but I got really sick of eating beans all the time (my poor wife hated it). What really sucked about it was that there was no way to account for extenuating circumstances in my reports. If I walked into one restaurant and there were 100 customers waiting to be served and I saw a dirty table, I had to mark it down and they were penalized for it. If I walked into an empty restaurant an hour later and it was spotless, they got a much better score. Are the two situations comparable? No, but score wise it didn't matter and the low volume restaurants always ended up with the best scores, while our highest grossers always ended up with dismal scores.

Some of the things I checked, like the temperature of the beans and the weight of the burrito, I could understand, as those should be consistent no matter how busy or empty a restaurant is, but so much of the evaluation was out of their control that the final score was essentially meaningless.

It was a happy day when I quit that job.