Hi, I'm Jose from Houston, Texas. I only recently started mystery shopping and I'm really liking it! I'm wondering, do things change dramatically as you gain more experience? Are there more opportunities for seasoned shoppers out there? Thanks for your time!

As we all know, you are generally not supposed to reveal yourself as a mystery shopper unless you're explicitly told to do so. Usually this is no big deal. Just hide the questionnaire, be sly when taking pictures, and act as a normal customer would. But I had an issue today while evaluating a mobile shop. I was to ask about new phones at a mobile carrier. Unfortunately my guidelines didn't say if I should pretend to be a concurrent customer or not. So when the employee asked if I currently had service with them (T-mobile), I said yes.

This was fine since he didn't ask for any information and began to show me the phones straight away. Or so I thought. After being recommended several phones, I was supposed to check the inventory of a few specific phones. When I inquired about this, the employee said he would connect to my account so he could proceed to check the inventory. Oh no...

He asks for my phone number. I give it to him without really knowing what I would do next. He does a bit of busywork behind a computer and then gets a bewildered look on his face. He says "that's weird, I don't have anything showing for this phone number. Are you sure you gave me the right one?" I respond by saying the account is in my mother's name actually, but he retorts by saying it should still come up. At this point I'm running out of excuses. He turns his screen to me and asks me if he entered it correctly. At this point I could either tell him he mistyped and prayed that whatever number I came up with, would miraculously be on their service, or I could bail on the idea of being their customer entirely.

So I channel my years of training in theater from high school. I put on the most perplexed look on my face and say "hold on a sec, you guys are the only carriers with a red logo right?" At this point my only option was to pretend I had mistakenly visited the wrong carrier. He responds with "no, we are pink". I say "what? It looks pretty red to me. Is there another red one?". At which point he informs me that Verizon had a red checkmark for their logo.

So now I've made it very clear that I'm not a customer. All of the questions and discussion we had were invalidated because my situation was different. Now I'm supposedly looking for phones at Verizon. This would normally not be a big deal, except I was one roadblock away from completing the shop. I needed the man's business card. So in a complete tangent I begin to talk about how I might need to separate from my mom's phone plan and I would need to look into a new one. I asked about prices, and then felt like I had justified myself enough to ask for a business card. I left that shop promptly and decided that if I ever do a similar shop again, I would just say I'm a new customer looking to switch to them and get a new phone.