Two Days and a Night in a Mall

Being married to an unpaid professional shopper results in many hours in Malls. Last week was no exception. Since I really don't care to shop, I spend a lot of time doing what I enjoy on a Mall and that is observing people, especially little people. However, last week was different. We were at two malls in two different states. Each of these malls contained research facilities. While they were called research companies, that is where the similarities ended. In the first, I found their interviewers to be energetic and neat in appearance. In contrast, the second company had very unenergetic interviewers and typically sloppily dressed. I had to say typically since there were a total of eight interviewers with the second company and only two of the eight were dressed in an acceptable fashion. The other six wore such things as baggy pants (both male and female), jeans, tee shirts with printed messages, long key chains, baseball caps (yes while interviewing), tennis shoes, etc. Another, and I think important, observation was the fact that the three interviewers in the first mall were in the age range of 35 to 45 while those in the second mall were young adults, with no one over the age of 25.

In the first mall, the interviewers did not waste any time moving from one potential respondent to another. In direct contrast, the second mall was anything but energetic. I had the opportunity to observe these interviewers on two occasions through out the week. On both occasions I did some timing. In 35 minutes with 6 interviewers, they made only one intercept. They would stand together, I think this is definitely a no-no, and did a lot of talking. I did a lot of listening. Actually one of the interviewers took two smoke breaks in the 35 minutes with a different interviewer on each occasion. They had to walk approximately 400 feet to the smoking area. On the second day at the same mall, I observed 4 interviewers during a 30 minute period in which they did not approach a single potential respondent. We may rationalize these events by saying there were not many shoppers (not the case) or they had very select population samples to recruit (again not the case). How did I know the eligibility? I saw the eligibilities. The company did not practice good security procedures. I could stand out in the mall and see on their production board the number of studies (there were 6), the eligibilities (two studies had eligibilities of FHH at approximately 90%, my estimation), identification of the products of interest, and the daily production (6 projects, 11 completes, in 6 hours).

I found these shopping trips to be interesting and informative. When was the last time you visited your test site unannounced to see the manner in which your tests are being conducted?