I Ain't Wearin' a Freakin' Wire, Man!

My friend said I could "get paid to shop at Nordstrom." Naturally, I wanted to hear more. She sent me the information, which was a list of hundreds of companies offering mystery shopping services to various retail and commercial clients. I optimistically registered with a few companies surveying high end restaurants and hotels, but after reading a couple of "About Mystery Shopping" articles, decided to narrow my focus to an industry that both pays its mystery shoppers well, and is so ubiquitous in my area that it is practically a cliche: new housing developments.

For those of you who live in areas so classy they were built out fifty years ago, new housing developments are an over-decorated fantasy world unto themselves. Most follow the same general format. You drive up (you always must drive; these developments are never located within walking distance of anything which already exists), following signs with lots of exclamation points, to the sales office. This is often a large trailer, or two pushed together with no wall separating them, or it might be built onto (or even actually into) a model home.

I blame the construction industry for putting the word "house" out of business, by the way. The three thousand square foot earth-toned hulking thing decorated with enough throw pillows and gewgaws to stock a Pier One is empty. It is unoccupied. It is not a home. It is nobody's home. What it is, plainly speaking, is a house. But during the 60s and 70s, someone decided "house" was cold. House was uninviting. And a house stopped being a house, even when clearly that is exactly what it is.

The other side of the coin is that "home" came to mean a detached single family residence (as in, "Do they live in an apartment?" "No, they just bought their first home." No! Were they homeless before? Of course not. An apartment is a home. An occupied trailer in a trailer park is someone's home. Even a bird's nest is the bird's home. It's certainly not his house.)

You can't find the ugly old word "house" on any of the glossy brochures in the sales office. And those vacant structures to be toured are not "model houses"; they are Model Homes (random non-functional capitalization goes hand in hand with saying "home" when you mean "house.")

Through the Sales Office is a door or gate leading to the Model Homes (See?! Capitals everywhere.) There are always at least three models, often more. They always go in order, from the base model, with its puny kitchen and mere three bedrooms, through progressively larger "Show Kitchens" and tremendous Great Rooms, to the largest, biggest kid on the block: the Hummer of houses. In my neck of the woods this number may easily have six or seven bedrooms, plus "Bonus Room" (often decorated with trompe l'oeil legal tomes as a man's office), wraparound loft at the top of the stairs with obligatory pool table (always a pool table; never a creative ironic gesture like a foosball table or taxidermy collection) and "flat screen television" (a piece of cardboard with a picture of waves crashing on it), and 400 square foot casita in the front.

The casita is the mother-in-law unit of Southern California suburbia. Since Temecula is the stay-at-home-mom capital of the known universe, and most of us are creative, entrepreneurial types, the casita next to the front door has become the woman's domain. What can you do with your casita? I have had my hair cut in two different casitas, each set up to look exactly like a fancy salon, complete with basins to rinse hair and racks filled with OPI nail polish. One woman I know runs her aromatherapy oil bottling business from her casita. I'm sure Arbonne team meetings are held in casitas all over town every week. Typical conversation: "Did you know Kimmie started a fragranced baby oils business?" "Wow! How does she do that?" "Oh, she has a casita."

Becoming a mystery shopper for the self-contained universe of new housing developments (or, as they refer to themselves, New Housing Developments) took a surprising amount of training. For starters, I had to wear a wire. "Covert recording required," the application said. I saw Serpico. I watch The Sopranos. I said a silent prayer in the Best Buy parking lot that I wouldn't end up in an avocado grove drainage ditch and went inside.

Normally five aimless minutes trying to call attention to myself in Best Buy is an hour in hell for me, but this day, when I asked the two guys chatting by the cellphone display for help with secret audiotaping, they were all over me. Surburban mom with an American Express card in her pocket trying to find anyone who will sell her a $2,000 computer? Invisible. Mystery lady with a post-it note with specifications for $15 covert recording devices? Fascinating.

I practiced wiring all my devices together, checking the battery strength, taping the on/off switch permanently into the "on" position, and running the wire through my bra, down my leg, and into the pocket of my front-pleat long khaki shorts (a fashion mistake I was able to recover from the bottom of a bag destined for Goodwill.) The lengthy manual from the mystery shopping company suggested the best outfit for covert taping, an outfit that screamed lesbian (Lesbian!) to me: loose fitting bottoms with deep pockets, Hawaiian shirt, and sturdy enclosed shoes with socks. This shopper is not butch, but she's not lipstick either. I preferred my "I'm not fat, I'm just wearing a wire threaded through my bra and into my pocket" outfit.

As I drove out to French Valley for my first gig, I cranked up 103.3, the local classic rock station, to pump myself up. I checked my lipstick in the mirror: "Showtime!" As instructed in the 25 page (single spaced) manual, I pulled off two blocks away and tested my equipment. "This is Drucie. It's May 3, 2005, 11:35 a.m. I am going to Paradise Hills today to shop Susie Smith." On/off switch taped to "on": check. Volume set to "max": check. Battery to lapel mic turned to "on": check. No wires visible: check. No papers with the mystery shopping company logo or questionnaire visible in car: check.

My heart pounded and blood whooshed through my ears as I pulled into the lot. At midmorning on a Tuesday, Susie would be alone, the only agent working her development that day. I walked in and froze: three agents stood around a plexiglass-covered 3-D model of the development, sipping coffee and laughing. My eyes shot around the room in a panic, taking in the Yankee Candle burning on one agent's desk, the teddy bear shaped jar of Reese's Pieces on another's. I tried to picture the page in my training manual that addressed this situation, but all they'd told me was to make sure to only (ONLY!) shop the agent I was supposed to shop. Do not shop another agent by mistake. Do not randomly choose one. Determine who "Susie" is and discreetly figure out a way to get her alone.

"Uh, I just remembered I need to call my husband," I stammered. Out in the preternaturally bright French Valley sun, every fiber of my body screamed, "Abort! Abort!" I called the mystery shopping company's (800) number. "What do I do they told me there'd just be Susie but there's like three of them why why are there three two women and a man so I can't even tell right away who Susie is I said I need to call my husband can they see me right now???!!!"

"Relax. Just go back in and tell them your husband talked to someone on the phone named 'Susie' last week, and she was so helpful that you want her to be the one to show you around."

This seemed implausibly crazy to me, so unlikely for any normal person to do, that I figured they'd nod knowingly to one another and rip my wire right out of my Wonderbra, but they seemed to take it in stride. "I'm Susie," YankeeCandle said brightly. "What is your husband's name again?"

I froze. At least two full pages of the 25 page manual had been devoted to the use of names and personal information. We were required to track follow-through (usually a friendly "What did you decide?" phone call, postcard, or email), so we had to give valid personal information, but we also knew that some of the builders tracked visitors by computer, entering all their personal information into the database. This could include cross-referencing (usually done by the agents while we walked through the models on our own), so if "Drucie Jones" gave 555-1234 as her phone number, then someone else came by to shop and her phone number was also 555-1234, but her name was "Annie Jones," they'd figure out they were being shopped. At the very least, it could lead to awkward questions. The suggested solution was to dole out personal information very sparsely, giving just the bare minimum required to be contacted, and nothing more, and (this is the key) remembering which closely guarded pieces of information were given out to which development. So "Drucie Jones" gives only her phone number to Paradise Hills, and next time she shops a BigBuilder development, she is Drucie Smith and only wants to give out her street address. The time after that, she is Annie Jones and prefers e-mail.

Susie had me walk through the models (which is where I also had been trained to quickly and discreetly step into a walk-in closet and test my recording equipment; many of the models were monitored by cameras or recording equipment to prevent theft or vandalism of all those tchochkes, but we knew walk-in closets were safe), then she joined me on the sidewalk outside to drive me in a golf cart to an actual house under construction.

"Bob, something's wrong with the golf cart," Susie said. A handyman leered at us from a tool shed and ambled over to help her. "Shove over, Sooz," he said, pulling into the driver's seat by pushing her toward me. Bob gunned the engine and took us on a wild ride over curbs and through mud puddles. "Ever see Bullit?" he asked, laughing. In between Susie explaining the company's generous bonus if I used their mortgage and home warranty program, both of our shrieks of terror are clearly audible on the tape.

After my $50 check from the mystery shopping company actually materialized as promised, I was hooked. The "shops" (as they call them in the industry) were 20-40 minutes long, so even with drop-in daycare costing seven dollars an hour (we were never allowed to shop with kids), I liked my profit margin. Plus, I loved touring the models. I saw lots of women in pairs and trios, pushing kids in strollers, clutching Starbucks cups and jotting down design ideas in little notebooks.

Most shops were uneventful, punctuated by occasional really weird ones, like the guy who ferried me from the Sales Office to the homesite in his raised monster truck with HTMISER vanity plate ("Heat Miser" from the 70s animated Christmas special "A Year Without Christmas," he informed me.) He had to physically lift me off the ground to get me inside, after sweeping a stack of lottery tickets off the passenger seat.

I quickly learned that our goal was to let the agents shine. Rude agent? Maybe she was having a bad day. Go back and give her another try. I felt okay about wearing a wire because we sincerely did try to stack the deck in their favor, asking perfect softball questions ("How good is your quality?" "Can you help me get a mortgage?")

This was definitely not the low-tech mystery shopping I remember from tagging along with Mom in the early 80s. I remember Mom shopping three banks on one day, and racing to get from Monterey to Seaside before they realized they'd been shopped. Mom called in from a payphone and was advised to change her appearance. Change? How? From a Volvo station wagon-driving mom with kids to what? We finally settled on pulling her hair into a ponytail. Another shop was at a grocery store in Watsonville. Mom was given a shopping list: lettuce, apples, bread, toilet paper; she was also given a sheaf of coupons to attempt to use. None of the coupons were for anything on the list, and it seemed so obvious and embarassing: How could they not notice? Amazingly, the checker didn't bat an eyelash. Riding home in the car with our sack of free lettuce, apples, bread, and toilet paper, we couldn't believe it. "It's unfair to people who really take time to sit down and clip and sort their coupons!" we agreed. I also remember a gig standing in Orchard Supply Hardware, asking people their zip code. You would not believe how many normal-looking adults do not know their zip code. "Uh, 408?" "I dunno."

I stopped mystery shopping when I was a few months pregnant, and now I can't do it until Bits is old enough to join Kids Care Club, the drop-in daycare next door to Trader Joe's. If I'm close to 40 and have a fancier car, maybe I can shop luxury homes, instead of the entry level ones I was deemed suitable for before (I was excited the few times they sent me to "move-up" developments instead of places I actually could afford if I were shopping in real life.)

Scott said to me the other day, "We need to redecorate." Redecorate? Try decorate. We really do. Our current decor is Ikea-meets-Fisher Price, with a little dorm room thrown in. Sure, I could subscribe to House Beautiful or Dwell, but why would I do that when I can load the kids up in their car seats, pop open a new canister of Gerber puffs for Bits, and have a day's free entertainment trooping through model homes? If I see a fellow mystery shopper, I promise I won't blow your cover.