One of the favorite mystery shops that I ever did was at Lowe's. In fact, I was waiting for a mystery shop at the store because of the bad experience that I had whenever I was shopping there prior to beginning my mystery shopping career. Once I saw the Lowe's store shop pop up on the radar, I was quick to accept it as I was sure I would be able to get a little bit of revenge on the people who had treated me so poorly in the first place. Now I know that mystery shopping is not about seeking out bad experiences, it is about evaluating people for the job that they do. Here's how my mystery shop at Lowe's ended up going for me.



Whenever I entered the Lowe's store the first thing that I was supposed to do was to find three different people in order to see if they would help me or not. I walked up and down the main aisle of the store, looking up each individual aisle to see if I could find an employee that was not busy at the time. Even though I had had a bad experience at the store before, I wanted to give them a fair opportunity to be able to get a good evaluation. As it turns out, my first experience with the store ended up being fairly typical of every experience that I ever had. The first person that I walked up to pretended not to see me and simply turned around and walked away. The second person that I walked up to did the same thing, so I followed them into another isle. They ended up ignoring me two times. The third person that I walked up to ended up talking on their personal cell phone, something that was definitely against the rules.

Every mystery shop has a particular department that you are going to want to single out. For this particular shop, it was the kitchen Cabinet department. I walked back into that department, looking like I was interested in purchasing some cabinets or least asking some questions. According to the instructions that I received ahead of time, I was to wait around for at least 10 minutes to see if anybody was going to ask me any questions. After several people walk past me without acknowledging the fact that I was there, I finally decided it was time for me to approach someone. The person that I approached not only was uninterested in my questions, they were not knowledgeable about anything in the area.

I know that a mystery shopper is not supposed to feel satisfaction when giving a bad report, even if they are out for personal revenge. In this particular case, however, giving them bad marks was quite appropriate. All I had to do was to answer each of the questions accurately and to provide them with names of certain employees. I felt as though I was giving the company what they truly wanted, an honest evaluation.