I work as a “secret shopper” for a short-term living. It is a temp job I’ve been doing for 5 months but, I absolutely loathe the system and how it’s just a glorified telemarketer where we ‘call’ the same business every day for months on end. This company Marketplace Insight is one of the most disorganized, crappy, out-of-touch and sloppy company I’ve ever worked for.
Now the question is: why did I agree to work at a crappy company? Divorce, seeing my family lose their rental home with nowhere to go and the frontend development jobs were not responding—A lot of layoffs in that career field that even my ex-husband who used to pull 200k a year cannot find work with all his experience. In short, I took it out of desperation, fear of being homeless and needing to find any place with any income within 3 months. It was something that I did not want nor was my first option when they were offering 12.00 hour job.
It is extremely degrading for such a low pay, but worse of all it’s worse than the jobs I’ve worked in my early 20s during college—The constant threat of hours being cut for not meeting unrealistic goals is vomit-inducing. You want to know what hurts? That same time this ‘company’ hired me, I had a tech support job that was offering 18.00 hour but, I’ve already accepted that position and the tech support job took two weeks to hear anything back and I didn’t have the time.
Now whenever I work this crap of a job, I feel nothing but rage of how unethical and sleezy they are gathering data. They don’t seem to understand and care that calling the same exact places via numbers is redundant and outdated. Not only that, it pisses people off (rightfully). So when we tell these fools the truth we get threatened.
It started off as a simple and chill job that I could do for income while I continued to study (I didn’t realize I was doing this out of fear instead of trusting my development skills) for a few months to every little petty thing is our fault. Did someone hang up? Our fault. Did the workers of said business get sus and started to verify numbers, despite us telling the managers and owners the same thing over and over again? It’s our fault, because we didn’t use scripts, ChatGPT or some other BS that’s beyond our control. This company does not have a handbook, no goals that we’re told to meet and constantly changes things on the fly (when they messed up something). Just a lazy company that poorly handles information.
I think this job targets people who are in a bind, because even at my time working as a cashier at 19, I never felt threatened about my job for things that I couldn’t control. Ever.
This may come across as someone complaining over an ‘easy job’ but, it’s an absolute slap in the face when there are plenty of jobs out there, such as fast food making 18.00 hr…Yet these fools who pay us poorly as 1099 workers who micromanage us acts like they are doing us a favor working remote fore 12.00hr? That’s poverty wages.
It’s why I treated this job as temp work. I honestly feel like they create more problems that are unnecessary for a low-wage, repetitive and simplistic job. Half of the issues could be solved if they weren’t so sloppy with paperwork and rules. As I write this, they still haven’t created the next sheet for us to harass—Oops, I mean call.
I should have left this stupid job, if I waited 2 more weeks I’d be working a job that’s sane and organized. I have no hard feelings to those who despise secret shoppers, because the work is BS and the companies that forces us to make these asinine and non-issue calls do not do so because they care about customers.
They do it so they can see where they can rise prices for customers—That’s it. So it irritates me, when these mangers act like what we’re doing means something with their hollow ‘inspiring quotes’ that makes me want to bash my head in the wall metaphorically. I am getting to the point where I want to tell workers to BLOCK US because then, the stupid company won’t harass them for the same stupid quotes they have gotten back-to-back for months—They can’t take the average sum and go from there—Oh no! They need to make busywork for the sake of doing so.
This job holds no purpose whatsoever, it is a BS job. Hell, they could get an AI to run the figures or pay someone to do so and probably get the same results.
I am done sitting here letting my trauma (financial and emotional) hold me back and I’ve started applying for developer jobs again. Hell, I’ll even do tech support just to get out of this toxic sphere. I’m so SICK AND TIRED of this one manger emailing us AT NIGHT complaining about this or whatever stupid mess they made (I didn’t realize it then but when she said to me when I was “training” she was like, “I make mistakes and I’m only human.”) funny how it doesn’t apply to us…? Oh, and how we were an ‘awesome team’ to we get fussed at for petty things when they don’t even give us clear targets—Correction, 0 targets and timelines they are quiet then get made at us and threaten to take our hours!
Well you know something? TAKE MY HOURS! I’m at the point I don’t care if I get canned from this lousy, harassing, no critical thinking, and deceptive job. Lied to me saying it was a ‘small business’ only to find out it’s a whole COMPANY!
This place tells lies!
Their website looks broken and still in the year 2005 yet they have someone to upkeep it? How? There is nothing remotely modern about it, they just left it that way, just like how they didn’t even try to create a handbook and guidelines for workers. Lazy, incompetent and sloppy workplace. It’s so embarrassing to work here. Some folks will think it’s ‘glamorous’ like in TV but, it’s deceptive work where the people at top do not care as always—But at least with other places, they show you their teeth upfront, this one lies, gaslight and shift the blame.
There is no formal reviews about this workplace—Which was suspicious to me and sometimes I wonder why. Either way, if I have to crawl my way to another city or whatnot to get out of this mess I will.
No more putting my skills down, no more imposter syndrome and no more working a toxic environment.
Thanks for reading.