When Corporate Sends a Secret Shopper and Your Pay Goes on the Line

Corporate decided the cure for retail chaos was a man in a blazer with a clipboard who grades your soul. Employees’ pay depended on these evaluations, which is a refreshing new way to incentivize terrified eye contact.

So someone follows the manual: they close the store for an hour, line up the Taquitos, and perform corporate theater because the secret shopper’s checklist says “must appear organized.” As one commenter put it: “Boss, how do you like dem Taquitos?” — he did not. Closing the store to satisfy a clipboard is the human equivalent of pausing a speedrun to check your inventory: technically within the rules, narratively catastrophic.

A lot of the commenters have the right instinct: if you’re harmed by this system, the proper response is not passive insult, it’s receipts. “And backpay + raise for the missed raises from before,” someone wrote, and honestly that’s the most surgical fix—pay people like adults, stop turning employment into improv theater for a stranger’s scorecard. Mystery shoppers usually give decent marks anyway (as another commenter observed: unless the service is truly awful, they tend to be merciful), which only makes the whole setup weirder: we stage a play so an already-friendly audience can tell us we acted well.

Mic-drop: if corporate wants honest service, the simplest experiment is radical—stop grading people with mystery shoppers and start paying them enough that they don’t have to perform for a clipboard. If you still insist on theatrics, at least send the secret shopper in for the Taquitos.