Secret Squirrel at Work!

This week, I have been quietly doing a Mystery Shop assessment on a high street bank. The work involves two parts. First I had to make a personal visit to the branch, and assess the cleanliness, friendliness of the staff, and their ability to answer certain questions accurately. Next I have to wait to see if they call me back on the phone as requested.

I have been doing mystery shopping as a hobby since 2004. So far, my reports have not been challenged, either by the venue or the companies I work for. Only once, have I made a mistake of going to the wrong venue, and basically wasting my time and effort on the survey.

Since the onset of this recession, the number of different venues, has begun to shrink, and more to the point, the payments for the time, and effort have reduced considerably. The biggest cutback has been the travelling allowance. One of the companies I worked for was called NOP. They had a policy of paying a mileage allowance to all destinations. So I was quite happy to travel over 50 miles to visit a venue. Sadly, NOP is no more, and the current employers either have a maximum payment of £3.50 for travelling, or sneakily include the travelling expense into the overall payment. So now I have become very choosy as to what venue I will visit.

Because I seem to provide good quality reports on the venues I visit, I often get contacted by one of my employers to visit a number of venues further away than I would normally accept. Then the employers are happy to pay the full travelling expense! It is actually quite fun to receive a call and get them to negotiate a price that is favourable to me!

Doing this kind of work also proves very helpful where I work for my main job. Here the tables are turned and we get mystery shopped on a regular basis! It also allows me to understand that every survey is always going to subject to the individual assessors viewpoint, and no two assessors can be truly similar. I am also very quick to challenge any result that shows that the assessor hasn't done his or her job fully.

When I first started doing this work, I was given the opportunity to visit a loan company. Now at the time, credit card companies were offering interest rates around 20%. Bank loans were about 10%, and mortgages were about 7%. This loan company specialised in giving loans to people who did not have a good enough credit rating to get a loan from the usual places. My task was to ask for £1000 to buy a new TV. I would only need to borrow the money for 1 year. As I went through the process, I discovered the sales person was trying to hide something from me. Whet she was trying to hide was the staggering 59% APR they were charging for the loan!

I never realised that if you you are in full time work, and pay your bills on time, you can get low interest credit, which you probably don't need, very easily. For those people who are in desperate need of credit to help sort out the mess they have got into, they are the ones who end up paying extortionate rates they can ill afford to pay! No wonder you hear stories of vulnerable people ending up with nothing from having out of desperation gone to loan sharks!

How difficult would it be for some institution to offer to help those in need by offering them a loan at a reasonable rate with the condition that they are taught how to manage their money as part of the deal. Most people in financial difficulty, do not want to face up to their problems, and let the problem continue to get worse until it is at a stage where they either lose everything, or they become so depressed that they seek solution in committing suicide.

There was a TV program a while back that had a financial advisor help families sort out their financial problems. Although this an interesting way to do this, it would only help a few people, lucky enough to be chosen to go on the show. There are thousands of other people in as much need of help, and don't have the luxury of waiting until a TV company might or might not choose them for its next broadcast.

It has puzzled me that everyone of us has to attend school from the age of 5 to 16. Everyone of us has to deal with income and expenditure, savings and loans, credit, and debit. Yet none of what we have to deal with on a daily basis in our adult lives is ever taught during our school years. I doubt much emphasis is placed on how important it is to budget your finances.

The present Government seems to think that getting further into debt is the answer to stop this recession biting deeper. Surely they would have been better off offering better incentives to businesses, so allowing them to continue trading, or new businesses to start up. Yes, there a large number of businesses caught up in the borrowing spiral, borrowing more than they can pay back. I still don't understand why banks would prefer to write off the debts to these businesses and lose all the money, rather than work with the directors of the company to work out a way of first stopping the hemorrhage of money disappearing, and then work to slowly get the business back towards profitability, and then to pay back their loans.