A Closer Look: Is mystery shopping with A Closer Look worth it?

What is A Closer Look?

A Closer Look is a consumer experience marketing company that enlists freelancers as mystery shoppers, editors and schedulers. Everyone works from home. However, none of them appear enthusiastic about the job or the company.

How it works

Shoppers sign up on the website to view potential mystery shops near you. If you want to work as an editor or scheduler, those are potential work-from-home jobs here too.

A Closer Look Review:

Of all of the mystery shopping opportunities reviewed on SideHusl.com, A Closer Look is the stingiest with their shoppers, editors and schedulers.

Everyone is paid by the job, not the hour. And that’s important, because you’re going to be asked to put in a lot of hours. If you tried to figure out your hourly rate, it would be depressing.

Shoppers say pay is generally in the form of reimbursement only. And that reimbursement doesn’t always cover the cost of the shop. So, you’re essentially paying to work for them.

Schedulers and editors say they’re on call 24/7, seven days a week, and earn the equivalent of a few dollars per hour. They get paid by the piece — essentially by the number of shops that they edit or schedule. But it’s tough to schedule people to work for less than cost.

And because shoppers are working for a pittance, they may not spend an inordinate amount of time on their write-ups, so editors are hard at work making sense of what shoppers had to say.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what job you take here, it’s going to be poorly paid and miserable.

Payments

Notably, not only are A Closer Look’s shopper payments small, they’re slow. Shoppers are paid by check once a month in the month following your shop. So, if you do a shop in June, you’ll get paid at the end of July. The company says it sends payments on “the fourth Monday” of the month. And you should expect that it will take at least 14 days after that to receive your reimbursement.

Recommendations

Mystery shopping doesn’t pay well in the best of circumstances, but there are better mystery shopping companies.

If you want to find mystery shopping gigs, we recommend EyeSpy, Service Evaluation Concepts, BestMark and SecretShopper. If you want to shop for groceries, we recommend Instacart, Shipt, Dumpling and TaskRabbit.

Want to try A Closer Look anyway?

Here’s a link to their site

What their shoppers say: (from Glassdoor)

Pay is generally reimbursement only

As Shopper: 1) reimbursement amounts are sometimes low and sometimes not even enough to cover what is required. 2) Very few shops offer payment on top of the reimbursement. 3) The shop search engine sucks and has not changed in 10 years, so it is far more difficult to find shops than with other companies.

As Editor: 1) expected to attend unpaid meetings. 2) You’ll get no positive reinforcement . 3) The difficulty of metrics increases. 4) Odd working schedule with not as much flexibility as one would think. 5) Expectation to coddle bad shoppers as if they are customers.

Pay doesn’t cover gas

Was sent work queries for out of town shops with bonuses that wouldn’t cover travel expenses (gas)

Be more upfront about the time that is needed for numerous tests. Three tests, one video, read a 15 pg document — all before the job. Then your gas, time during review, endless emails daily, and paying upfront for food…only in hopes of getting paid back. It is not worth a total of $8

Even when a review on a shop is approved you won’t receive your full refund. So it’s still money out of your pocket working for them. Expect 20 emails, calls, text a day offering secret shops on the 5 companies they work for. Find another secret shopper company. This one is not worth your time or effort.

What their schedulers say (from Glassdoor)

You will always be working at home. No days off ever. Low pay for the hours worked. They expect 7 days a week 365 days a year. If you complain they give you harder areas to work. High pressure negative environment. I honestly can’t say anything positive.

Schedulers have no days off. Not even 1. Expected to work 7 days a week 365 days a year. Responsible for “selling” shops to the shoppers for no pay reimbursement only.

Grueling

40-60 hour work week for less than $600 a month.

You will be paid below minimum wage, but expected to work 50 hours a week to meet goal. You will be able penalized for not answering the 102,728 emails you get asking if you scheduled a shop. A lot is asked of you for the amount of pay.

What their editors say (Glassdoor)

I worked as an editor and, to be honest, the interview/training process lasted longer than my employment with the company. I chose to walk away because the job was stressful, tiresome, and the small amount of money the company pays its editors is almost criminal. In training, you can work several hours on editing ONE shop, only to be paid [on average] about $4-$6 per shop…..you will make pennies compared to the amount of time you put into the work. I’m sure things get a little easier as you become more experienced with the editing process but for the extremely low pay, it’s not worth it. ACL should pay editors per hour rather than per shop.

(from the Better Business Bureau)

[Sheduler] I worked for this company for 8 months. And I put in about 40-65 hours a week depending on the time of the month. My paycheck was around $500-$700, depending on how many shops I filled. The amount of work for the little amount of pay is absolutely insane.  Although I was working as hard as I could, I couldn’t convince 150 people to do low-paying mystery shops each month.

Terrible company that treats their schedulers like dogs. The people that have left [positive] reviews are employees of the company. What does that tell you?!?

2/6/2024