Coporate Research International has been the worst company I've ever worked with! I joined a few months ago because they had alot of jobs in my area and since then I have done many jobs for them. Yet I have not gotten paid for anything yet and to my calculations they owe me over $100! They are so picky and they seem to want me to make something happen at a store that I cannot! They made my shpper rating go down because of a mistake on THEIR part and lost me a bunch of money. Stay away from this company!

Good Morning! The first step is to calm down. If you feel you are accurate and justified on these comments - Contact their Auditor Relations Person. Jen Marsell jmarsell@mysteryshops.com . Tell your story, name names and provide emails related to your problem. It worked for me...

Thanks, I will try that. I'm sorry, I'm just so frusterated. I drove over 150 miles to do 2 shops for them and they are telling me that both are invalid.

I understand your frustration. Please let us know how it works out...

Ok, I emailed her. What trouble with them did you have?

Did a leftover bonused shop from the previous month. Different instructions from current month. Editor was an idiot and refused my shop / dropped my shopper rating. Never admitted her mistake. It took this third party to straighten her out...

Thats what my shops are that I'm having problems with! They are both shops from last month! I did 8 already for this month and they haven't had a problem with one! Adn what do you mean by it took a third party?

Third party is the Auditor Relations person. You are party #1, the editor is party #2, and Jen is party #3 who gets to look at both sides of the issue.

Sometimes the Auditor Relations (or Shopper Advocate) can spend the time to unravel the situation calmly, but often they are just a rubber stamp for the company position. It depends on the company and the third party's spine. But if Jen has worked for mrcomputer101 it is indeed the place to start with extreme calm and control. Write your email, go get a cup of coffee or take a walk around the block and come back to re-read it to make sure it is cold fact rather than hot frustration.

Should not this thread be moved to the section on MSC's? Most people will not see a discussion of CoRI in the section on introductions of members...

So I wrote to help and she sounded like she could help me. Yay! Sorry if this isn't in the right place. I just joined and don't really know my way around yet.

All is well! Just got an email back from her saying that shes not sure what happened and they will pay me for both jobs!

Rejoice Very glad to hear of a good outcome, with a little help from your friends.

You're completely forgiven for posting in the wrong place; the thread can be moved.

Excellent! Glad it worked out for you. Wonder if it was the same Idiot Editor?...

There was 2 different ones. And at one point 2 editors for one assignment. It was really strange and mixed up. I'm just glad i'm getting paid. I drove over 150 miles for those jobs!

C.R.I. is the first MS company I started with back in 2005. I have done a lot of shops for them and have always found them to be fair in their dealings with me. I live in Bismarck ND which is 160 miles from the eastern Montana border. Evidently they don't have many shoppers in the Montana area that can do their gas station mystery shops because they call me quite a bit to see if I am interested in doing another road trip for them. They used to be very generous with these shops when they were getting to be last-minute but lately they seem to have tightened their purse strings a bit so I don't go out there as much as I used to. However, I have NEVER had a problem getting paid by them. In fact, I think they are the fastest paying company I work with. I don't much like their rating system though. I haven't figured it out yet but it seems like 1 mistake in a shop is worth at least 100 shops done correctly. Last summer I was out in Montana and I did quite a few shops for them. One of the shops was entirely my fault for making a mistake (I forgot to take 2 of the required pictures, must have been a senior moment) and another one they said the pictures didn't come through and wanted me to re-upload them. When I went back to my laptop, somehow the pictures for that shop were gone! Anyway, my rating because of all this slip from 4 point something to under 3 so after that I wasn't allowed to self-assign anymore. This spring I finally got exasperated enough that I contacted one of the people there that I have come to know quite well and complained about my rating. She talked to one her supervisors and the supervisor raised my rating to 3 again so now I can self assign if I want to. This really comes in handy on the weekends when I suddenly find myself going to another town for some reason and C.R.I. has a shop there that I can do because now I can self-assign. Before I would have to email them and hope someone was working on Saturday to assign. Nuf said.

That was another thing I was wondering....how payment works with them. I got 2 emails saying that a certain amount was going to be direct deposited into my account and its not the full amount they owe me. How does that work?

They pay me using Paypal. They deduct a fee for doing do...:p

I get paid by direct deposit and it's usually pretty fast. If I do a shop and get the report in and accepted during the first half of a week, I will normally be paid for that shop on Friday of the following week. If the shop I do is in the last part of the week, I normally get paid a week from the following Friday. Since I am in the Central Time Zone and CoRI is in the Eastern Time Zone, normally when I get up in the morning on Friday, I can check my bank balance on the internet and the deposit is already there. Other companies I work with are not so quick to pay but then again may be easier to get along with. The quickest pay I ever got was from the Brandt Group. I did a furniture shop for them on Sunday afternoon and on the following Friday I got paid.

I started working with this company in March and I love it. They pay within ten days each and every time. It's hard to go by another shoppers experiance. Many of the companies that people complain about are my favorites. It may have to do with where you live, ect...

It differs with the schedulers and editors you are stuck with. Even though I won my round, I have been under the gun with the Editor I complained about since then...:p

There is a fairly thin line between what makes working with a company a reasonable business proposition or not. Few of the jobs offered could be said to "pay well"--they just pay well when compared to other shops. Few companies "pay quickly"--they just pay sooner than other similar companies.

It really, for me, comes down to what companies are reasonable to try to deal with. I had a company I liked working with the schedulers. Last year a little $15 job I didn't receive a check for. They indicated they had sent it and quoted check number and date. That doesn't help if it never got to me. After several requests that the check be stopped and reissued, the company let the check go to it's last validity date and on a subsequent email told me they were "taking care of it today". No check ever arrived. We had verified my mailing address and indeed a checks for previous and subsequent jobs arrived without issue. Something like a dozen emails just to try to get paid. I have scratched them off my list of companies worth working with.

Another company others love. Their fees are mediocre. They then have way too many shopper contacts because of their inability to read. Their communication got worse, their website was slow and seriously extended the time to put in a report and when their scheduling became inflexible, that was it for me.

It is a fragile trust between shopper and company at best. I find that when a company persistently posts shops that are systematically too low fee to be feasible even if you are at the location already, there is little reason to trust them as a business partner. Sure, I will on occasion take a CoRI job with a substantial enough bonus that it is a fair business proposition, but those are few and far between. This IS a business, I AM a professional shopper and if all they or their clients care about is that a warm body appear at the shop site, that is their business choice. I am more disturbed that they then penalize warm bodies for not doing it right.

Ran into trouble with another CR editor today. This "Person" has the same last name as the other one I had trouble with. Brother/Sister? Husband/Wife? Both? I dunno. Wanted a bathroom picture with both the toilet and the sink. I explained that the sink was outside of the restrooms. The hallway door is blocked open with a direct line of sight to the CSR. Reason? Last month a woman give birth in the bathroom...

No response after my explaination and I guess my shop is still on hold......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2009 02:46AM by mrcomputer101.

We do get into predicaments sometimes I went out to take night time photos of billboards tonight. First stop was a billboard atop a sleezy bar. No lights on the sign, so I'm standing in the parking lot trying to get a close up shot and then step back to my car across the street for the longer view. My flash is going off when a couple guys come out and cover their license tags . . .

Next stop I pull off on the side of the road for my longer view and a car stops to offer me roadside assistance. I thank them, telling them everything is okay. Make a U turn a few blocks further on and return to the sign to get a photo from the same side of the road. As I am taking the photo I am hearing heavy breathing. As I get back in the vehicle I realize the heavy breather is a cow who has gotten out of her pasture and has her head in the passenger window. She withdrew her head when the interior light went on but left a large trail of drool on the passenger seat.

The rest of the photo shoot worked fine luckily.

The first-funny. The second-nice. The third-YUCK. That is just gross. Cow drool. The things shoppers put up with. :-)

Ha ha WHat I want to know is where in the heck do you live Flash? There aren't many places that have a sleezy bar, a do-gooder passerby and a heavy breathing cow that checks out the interior of your car by sticking its head through the passenger window!!!Yep, as shoppers we are willing to put up with a lot to get that fee. Thanks for the late night laugh,

Haha Flash that sounds like where I live...: p

I am in Florida and have a small farm myself on the edge of a small to mid size city. There are still 5-150 acre chunks of land inside city limits that have not been developed that are fenced with cows on them to keep the property taxes at the low agricultural assessment level. My round trip for photos last night was about 34 miles, with the sleezy bar an old place that used to be 'way out in the country' and the cow pasture on one of the main N/S routes through town and right in the heart of 'light commercial/industrial' properties including architects, upscale plumbing and tile stores etc.

The area includes a whole lot of rednecks who will always stop and offer assistance when they perceive a female is having car troubles. I haven't changed a tire or needed to call for roadside help in more than three decades. I even had one guy a few years back note that my spare was soft and he pulled out his compressor to inflate it before putting it on. I drive a truck and my spare is hard to get to to check because it is stored under the truck bed.

haha ok, not even close to were I live up here in SoDak.

I have done a few jobs for Corporate Research but I find that the job requirements (lots of observations/low pay) generally are not reflected in the payments. If a shop pays $10. and I work for 2 hours and spend money on gas that's way less than minimum wage. I don't do any shops that pay less than $10. per hour. Even a Mac's Milk job for Service Intelligencs pays $10. and the jobs only take about 10 minutes plus another 15 minutes for the report.
As far as dealings with them, they have paid what they said they would pay and I have always been paid on time. I have not experienced any problem with rudeness and I appreciate the rating system because it keeps me on my toes with all my shops. Even at $10. an hour companies deserve accuracy and honesty.

KanEHdeANNA, please edit your post--you have named both a client and the company that shops them in the same post. Generally naming a client and company even in the same thread is considered a violation of your ICA.

Corporate Research or CoRI or CORI does have jobs that pay much too little for expectations. Even when they bonus, the initial bonuses don't even get them to decent pay for expectations. They keep shoppers coming back because when they can't find suckers to take their jobs the prices keep going up and it becomes a test of judgment of when to take the bonus before somebody hungrier grabs it. I rarely even check their board any more because I have some very hungry shoppers in my area who grab the shops at the original fees. I figure they think they are great mystery shoppers because they are finding so much work. They will also quit shopping when the economy gets better if they don't wise up because, "You can't make any money mystery shopping."