Eight Feet Deep

A secret shop­per follows-up on a cus­tomer pur­chase from Vic­to­ria Secrets.

It seems like a lot of secret shop­per oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there these days. Every­where you turn, on a job board or on craigslist, an adver­tise­ment is offer­ing a won­der­ful career as a mys­tery shop­per, restau­rant reviewer, etc.

About 20 years ago I did some secret shop­ping for this com­pany out of Austin. The job con­sisted of going to a num­ber of Dairy Queens in East Texas, buy­ing a meal and then writ­ing a report about the expe­ri­ence. They wanted to know about the qual­ity of the food, clean­li­ness of the place, cus­tomer ser­vice and yadda. Although I really don’t remem­ber, I sup­pose they paid me some­thing else other than in Hunger Busters and Chicken Fin­ger Bas­kets (Before this expe­ri­ence, I never knew chicken had fin­gers, badum-bum-CHING!)

But with­out a doubt my expe­ri­ence as a DQ detec­tive got old. One can only eat a ham­burger that is under­cooked, sur­vive and then write about its lack of fla­vor so many times. I did, how­ever, count myself as for­tu­nate that my sleuthing was at Dairy Queen rather than some of the secret shop­per company’s other clients such as a par­tic­u­lar chain hair salon. Like a friend told me back then: “How many bad hair­cuts can a per­son get?”

Actu­ally, I had a near-tragic expe­ri­ence at that chain salon. For the life of me, I can’t recall the name of the chain. It was long ago — when I had hair and when I vis­ited bar­ber shops rather than mak­ing my pool-cue head an exten­sion of my facial shave.

One day I got a hair­cut at this chain which was inside a Longview, Texas, mall. The hair­cut was going okay until the bar­ber spied this pretty, young woman who was walk­ing in the mall wear­ing spray-on jeans and a hal­ter top that might have cov­ered a cou­ple of pen­nies on a good day. Now, I must say that I looked rather intently at this work of nature and/or cos­metic surgery. After all, what else is there to do in a barber’s chair? The prob­lem was the bar­ber — with clip­pers in one hand and a comb in the other — was also check­ing out Miss It and he stuck the comb in my eye. For­tu­nately, I wasn’t injured.

I am telling all this in case some­one who is read­ing this blog is think­ing about a career as a secret shop­per. It isn’t all glamor and intrigue. Real dan­gers exist such as E. coli from who-knows-what-or-where or being blinded by an inat­ten­tive bar­ber. Trust me, it’s just not worth it.