Anyone ever do any of these audits? How are they? Are there a lot of problems?

I did 3 aduits for them in May. It was 50 items not 100 and it sure took more than 2 hours to do. I will never do them again.

I did 1 on the Gulf Coast at a large retailer, where a manager had to take you around the store. The manager came up to the service desk where I was waiting, took one look at me and said, "I really, really don't have time for this today." I apologized profusely and treated her with as much respect as I could muster and it went FINE! We actually had fun walking around the store, she was quite personable once we got started!

Would I do it again? I don't know. It paid a little above average, and it wasn't that hard filling out the forms in the store--but man it was a pain in the backside to input!! All those 100 items......

Never in a million years. Unless I was starving. Someone remarked in a similar thread that the manager said they had never seen the same person twice doing these audits. That say's a lot.

Yes, that was me!

At least the only data entry necessary for the prices was the items which scanned incorrectly. My biggest beef was my aching feet and the painful tendinitis flareup from all the writing on a clipboard!

I've done a couple of them and don't find them to be too bad. It all depends on the attitude of the person walking you around. I had one lady that was so pleasant. I apologized to her for taking up 2 hours of her workday. She said, "Hey, its work. I'd rather be walking around with you than doing some of the other work I have to do during my shift."

The pay should really be a bit higher though.

Yes, I did one with a really super manager walking me around. He found things that I did not and called somebody to fix them. Since they were not things appropriate to the part of the list I was working on, I did not feel I needed to report them. We did find two things out of the 100 due to my audit, and those were reported. I went into a store where there was horrible manager attitude and substantial issues. I would not return to the second store on an audit without having checked first to make sure things had improved because the report time on that one was just awful.

They need to up the pay, even double it. That is a big commitment of one's time.

The problem I see is that for a store in good condition, with a cooperative manager and few issues to be reported, the fee is fair. As soon as you get into a situation where the manager is a jerk and the place is a mess, the amount of time needed goes way up both for the onsite visit and for the report. That makes the fee ridiculously low. I don't have an answer to how you place a fair price on all of the visits unless you paid by the hour. Obviously the stores that have issues need to be examined more often and more carefully than the stores that have their act together. But I won't be auditing a trashed store for a fee appropriate to a well maintained store.

I actually enjoy them now. I've been doing them for a few years, both the 50 an 100 item audits.

The 50 items now take me about 40-60 minutes and the 100 item take about 60-75 minutes. At one store, I've had the same manager several times, so we sort of know how each other works and the audits go really quickly.

I have done a few of these. One was extra exceptional. The manager was super and the store was immaculate. They were really on top of things. I just wish all of them were like that, but that is not always the case.

Oh the nightmares that audit brings back for me.

I probably could try one again and recall that that the data entry itself was not all that bad.

This was one of those everything that could go wrong did go wrong shops. I get there and the manager is just going to lunch and has me wait the half hour til he is back. Shop itself is going very smoothly once he gets back and we are about half done when severe weather strikes. Security forces us into a dressing room area with about 30 other people. After about 40 minutes, we are left out all hot and sweaty. The computer system crashed during the storm, so we could not check if any of the prices were actually right. Waited about an hour for the system to come back up to no avail. Actually did walk around and write down all the numbers and prices, figuring we could do a quick scan when it comes back.

Contact the MS company and get permission to finish the following day as they still have no idea when system will be back up and I have already been there for over four hours. On the phone, I am told I will be given a $10 bonus because of all the challenges, but I must complete the next day or shop will be given to someone else.

Come back the next day and the computers are only partially working as they will come up in the cash registers, but not the hand held scanners. I can't wait as we are heading out of town for 4 days that afternoon, so if I don't complete I will lose out on money I have worked very hard for already.

Even though I wrote down the sku numbers the day before, there was an extra code for color, etc that I was unaware I needed, so most of them did not work. Had to run from department to department gathering the items and taking them to register. Many of the prices are coming up wrong and we come to realize that a sale started that day, so the prices I had written down from the day before are no longer valid and I don't have the correct balance of sale, advertised, regular priced items.

I am trying to correct and get the balance right and the manager is beginning to become upset saying the shop should just be invalidated and started over. Most of the differences in scan vs signed prices are from before the storm happened, so not related to that. My notes are a serious mess because of all the changes. What I figured would be maybe 15 minutes ended up being over an hour.

I go home and check my e-mail and have a reprimand because my report isn't submitted yet. I do submit, but of course there is no record of the bonus.

It was a frustrating and difficult shop, but definitely not the norm. I vowed to never do it again, but since the problems were not really a direct issue with the store or the MS company, it would be something that I might consider again --- If I checked the weather.

Shelly, your story made my toes curl!

My per hour pay stunk on that one, but I had gotten so far into it, I couldn't see walking away and getting zero for it.

So though while it is not the MS company or the stores fault, I kept it on my no way list for a while.