If your idea of satisfying work is to get paid in products, services or a small amount of money on a piecework basis for tattling on low-waged service industry workers, secret shopping just might be your dream job.

Many retail and hospitality sector corporations now turn to secret shoppers, also known as mystery shoppers, to spy on their service employees and report every detail of the transaction back to management. They rate the entire shopping experience, from store presentation of products to employee compliance on the use of scripts and upselling techniques.

Employees don’t find out that they have been “secret-shopped” until days, weeks, or even months have passed. There is no opportunity for input from the employee into the secret shopping report.

Finding service workers who are willing to discuss this practice on the record is difficult. I struck up a casual conversation with a cashier at a well-known electronics retailer one morning as my purchases were being tallied up. The store was empty, and no manager was within earshot.

The cashier told me that they get secret shoppers “all the time.” They do not reveal themselves at any point during or after the transaction, nor do they give their report to the manager. Instead, they send their report to Head Office, which sends the report to the store manager, who then has a meeting with the employee to go over it.

At this point in the conversation, I told the employee that I was writing an article about secret shopping, and asked if we could do an interview at some point. The response was immediate and polite: “Sorry, I’d rather not.” Then, his demeanor changed from informal and chatty to polite and professional. Although the transaction was already done, he asked me whether I would like to buy an extended warrantee for $5 on the $15 item I had just bought.

“No, that’s okay. Don’t worry,” I joked, “I’m not a secret shopper.”

The cashier smiled politely and said with a wary laugh, “Well, you just told me.” In his eyes, I changed from friendly customer to possible spy in a split second—and he had almost forgotten to do the upsell.

His fear is understandable. According to Alex Dagg, Canadian Co-Director of UNITE HERE, a union that organizes many workplaces in the hospitality sector, this is an unfair management practice. “As an employee, how do you defend yourself against a secret shopper?” she points out. “You don’t know who they are. You don’t know when it occurred. It’s their word against yours. In a non-union setting, there are no hearings, there’s no opportunity to discuss your side. You’ve got no chance if you’ve gotten a bad rap from one. It’s totally subjective, totally unfair.”

UNITE HERE has good reason to dislike the practice. One of their shop stewards at a downtown Toronto hotel, “Marilyn,” recalls a room service attendant who had been working at the hotel for years, and was fired for “stealing” after he tried to rectify a mistake by giving a free glass of milk to a secret shopper posing as a guest. “He brought the order, and they said, âe~You forgot the milk.âe(TM) And he brought up a glass of milk and didn’t charge them for it, and he got fired. They said he was stealing because he was giving away the food. That was a secret shopper.”

“Ahmed,” a room service attendant and UNITE HERE member at the Holiday Inn on King in downtown Toronto, says that secret shopping reports do not take into account understaffing and shortage of proper supplies. “Whenever you serve the guests, you have to put the coffee pot on the table, with the logo on the front. But most of the time we don’t have the logo coffee pot.” He says a co-worker got suspended for one day without pay for not using a coffee cup with the hotel logo when serving a secret shopper, despite a chronic shortage of coffee cups with logos.

Hotel workers also get penalized on secret shopping reports for slow service due to understaffing. “They want great service, but they don’t provide enough staff to give them the great service,” says Ahmed.

This is why Dagg considers unionization to be essential. “[Secret shopping] is very pervasive in the hospitality sector. It’s a very powerful management tool. In a union environment, we defend our members. The employer has to give a good reason to discipline someone. The just cause and grievance procedures are the best tools to deal with it. Without the opportunity to defend yourself, you’re going to be beat.”

Secret shopping is not a lucrative career, and scams abound. According to CBC’s Street Cents, the very first google hit for “secret shopper,” the Canadian Organization of Professional Secret Shoppers, which sells a guidebook for $35, exaggerates not only the compensation and benefits paid to secret shoppers, but also the opportunities available for work in the field.

Online “urban legend” and hoax debunker, Snopes.com says it is worker beware: some scams posing as mystery shopping organizations fleece would-be secret shoppers of thousands of dollars by asking for up-front “enrollment fees.” Snopes advises people to ignore any pitch that involves the worker paying money to work.

However, at least one “legitimate” secret shopping gig does require their workers to pay an up-front fee for the privilege of working. Cineplex mystery shopper Briane Nasimok was required to pay a “minimal fee” for “processing” the application.

Secret shopping is a billion-dollar industry of part-time pieceworkers who get paid a pittance to spy on other workers who are usually also low-waged. When asked how she feels about this aspect of the industry, Dagg was non-committal. “People need employment. It’s unfortunate. But we’re defending our employees from them, so I really don’t have any comment on that.”

Marilyn is more blunt in her assessment of secret shoppers. “I wouldn’t do that job,” she says. “Trapping people—that’s not nice. And I know, because I’m working class, I know how hard people work. It’s not nice for you to do something to make somebody lose their job. I don’t care how much they’re paying.”

Michelle Langlois

Michelle Langlois

Michelle is the editor of In Cahoots and is based in Toronto, Ontario. She has written articles and book reviews for rabble.ca, and occasionally produces videos for rabbletv.