Who is this masked shopper? 

Thursday 19th June, 2008 - £8,920.19 in debt…

Are you a mystery shopper? Are you fed up of the shopping company you work for? Or are you absolutely crazy about them? Have you tried becoming a mystery shopper without success, having been turned down or frustrated by the application process? Whatever your experience with mystery shopping companies, I want to hear from you.

After learning (from www.moneysavingexpert.com) that mystery shopping is something that people do when they’re trying to pay off their debts, I signed up with a single company to test the waters. This was about three weeks ago and I’ve had three assignments. So far, I haven’t been ‘discovered’, I haven’t been asked to mysteriously shop at an abattoir or brothel, and I haven’t gone mad with power and had anyone fired.

The way it works is:

    (1) You sign up on a mystery shopping website.

    (2) The site offers you various shopping assignments in your area.

    (3) You accept an assignment, carry it out, and then report back.

It can be time- and petrol-consuming, but the trick is not to accept anything too far out of your way.

Most of the jobs seem to pay about £5 to £10, and you’ll be reimbursed for anything you have to spend as part of the assignment (up to a certain budget). It’s not a proper job, and you couldn’t possibly use it to pay the bills, but it’s a bit of extra pocket money and you can end up with some good free stuff.

I’ve started signing up with more companies, after getting advice from this mystery shopping blog. Although I haven’t yet been given any assignments from anyone but Retail Eyes, my complete list of employers is:

Retail Eyes

Quality Eye (these people also recruit for focus groups)

JKS

TNS

GFK

Optimum Contact

Bare International (yes, this is a mystery shopping company. You won’t be required to shop in the nude).

Before long, I’ll be compiling a guide to all these sites and sticking it on this blog. That’s where I need your help.

If you’ve got anything to tell me about your mystery shopping experiences, please email me at OliviaBuck@live.com or post a comment. Are there any sites I’ve missed? Or any I should avoid like the plague? Over to you…

 At the first month junction 

Tuesday 3rd June, 2008 - £8,920.19 in debt…

So, I’m a month into my two-year pledge to pay off all my debts. So how’s it going? Well, I’ve had a few victories, a few disappointments, and the jury is still out on a few things. The jury being me.

Unbridled triumph!

 (1) My biggest success has been filling out my tax return and paying the resulting £421 rebate straight onto my Barclaycard. This has saved me about £63 a year in interest.

(2) Second only to that was paying off my NatWest card by selling a few things on eBay. This has got me back into the habit of Ebaying things I don’t need, and I’ve made a total of £142.78, with more on the way.

(3) I’ve changed my current account to a Barclays First Additions account (which is only available to existing Barclays customers). This means I’m paying a monthly fee of £6.50, but the preferable overdraft interest rate will save me money in the long run: About £18 a month, if my calculations are correct.

(4) My Capital One card is now charging interest after the introductory offer, so I’ve chopped it up. Even though there’s a picture of a pig on it.

(5) And, through doing Martin Lewis’s budget planner, I’ve discovered how much I spend every month. It’s a lot more than I earn. This could be seen as a failure, but at least I know what I’m doing wrong and I can change my ways.

Failure! Doom! Disaster!

(1) Online surveys. After spending about a billion years (give or take) on the sign-up processes for these things, I’ve made no money from them because I don’t meet the criteria for answering any surveys. I might have to start lying.

(2) Trying to change the interest rates on my credit cards didn’t work at all.

(3) I quit my part-time job. Although this has been very good for me, mentally speaking, it means I’m £181 more skint every week. The four recruitment agencies I’ve spoken to so far have produced no jobs.

Not Quite Sure Yet…

(1)  I’ve written to my bank to reclaim the charges I’ve paid over the last six years, but this will take up to two years to sort out, so I’m not putting any of my eggs in that basket.

(2) I really must get around to switching my energy, broadband and home phone suppliers, but I always seem to find more interesting things to do, like creating Facebook profiles for my cats.

(3)  Mystery shopping for www.retaileyes.co.uk has the potential to be a good little pocket-money-spinner, and an excellent way to get someone else to pay for my shopping. It’s gone well so far, but I haven’t received any actual cash for it yet, so I’m still erring on the side of caution.

(4) The same goes for www.consumerpulse.co.uk – a site where you answer a few questions about the things you’ve bought during the week, building up points, which you then exchange for vouchers. So far, so massive-waste-of-time (is what I thought at first), but I’ve got a good tenner’s worth of points in a fortnight. I haven’t yet received my first voucher, and the site doesn’t give me any smallprint, so I’m crossing my fingers as it seems too good to be true. Again, watch this space…

My name? It’s Oli….i mean Groucho

Friday 23rd May, 2008 - £9,361.55 in debt…

I can’t tell you exactly what I’m doing next week as it’s a top secret mission involving espionage, stealth and quiet browsing. Don’t tell anyone, but Olivia Buck is entering the clandestine world of the mystery shopper. Sshhhhhh…

I’ve always thought mystery shopping would be a bloody good thing to do, especially if I were required to mysteriously shop for some amazing shoes or a new car or something. But I also thought it was a bit too good to be true.

Then yesterday, by chance, I was visiting a friend when she got a phone call from a company called Retail Eyes. She took some notes, asked when the assignment had to be done, put the phone down, donned a panama hat and aviator-style sunglasses, asked me to look after her children “if anything happens – you know…”, and left the house with a £5 note and a look of blind panic.

Who wouldn’t want to be a mystery shopper? The excitement; the glamour; the promise of £7.50 if you hand in your report by 7pm… I wanted a slice of her lifestyle and, by golly, I was going to get it.

The sign-up procedure was simple – a huge contrast to those of the online survey companies and, I suspect, far more worth it in the long run. From now on, I just have to keep up-to-speed with the assignments available (by checking the website) and make sure I can absolutely, definitely complete any assignment I sign up for. Otherwise I will be hunted down and shot in the knees (or so the terms and conditions seem to suggest).

My first assignment is on Wednesday of next week, but obviously it’s all very hush hush. I’ll be paying with unmarked notes and covering my tracks by zig-zagging wildly up the road before entering the shop. Can’t be too careful.

Any advice? Have I said too much? What’s a reasonable price to pay for a bullet-proof vest? Over to you…