Shop and compare!

(Originally published 8/30/2007)

I had a long and lustrous career as a food server before stumbling into Recruitment. I waited tables off and on for almost 10 years before settling into this profession. Waiting tables was something I was good at due to my bizarre talent of remembering tedious information. My brain nurtures facts that most of society would deem meaningless, like knowing the name of every Real World cast member, and rejects things that might someday come in useful, like my mother’s birthday or where I parked my car.

I worked for most of the major restaurant chains during this period in my life. I’ve served hot wings at Applebee’s to starving hillbillies in sweat-stained wife-beaters. I’ve delivered Chili’s Top Shelf Margaritas to countless tables of feisty mean-spirited ghetto princesses. Due to my god-given nature of not really giving a f*ck about anything, in dangerous combination with a temper that at times can make Bobby Knight look like he’s on Valium, I was fired from most of these places, managers citing various incidences of my having thrown money or swore at people. Once I even put a cigarette out in someone’s desert. But I digress. C’est la vie.

Once while working at a Spaghetti Warehouse in Memphis, I was summonsed to the manager’s office to discuss my behavior towards a "Secret Shopper" table. A Secret Shopper, apparently, was someone planted in the restaurant by management to critique my every move and decide based on my performance as to whether or not they would return to the restaurant or suggest us to their friends. Needless to say, I let my employers down. But what struck me as odd was this whole concept of secretly shopping, this idea of physically coming in to the restaurant to eat only to sit there and form commentary as opposed to enjoying yourself. What an intriguing yet deceitful maneuver! As the waiter, they had me convinced that they had already made up their minds about where they wanted to eat, yet in their heads swam doubt and judgment about everything from the drink order to dropping off the check. Would I have performed better had I known all along that they were fully distracted by the other choices of restaurants that they had? You bet! That whole experience left me feeling as if someone had been spying on me. Being measured against someone else is absolutely no fun when you have no idea that there is even a competition going on.

I revisited this subtle feeling of betrayal recently when talking to my friend Hector about a guy who took an entire 5 days to respond to an email I had sent. Already having written the guy off, Hector sympathized with him, telling me that maybe he was busy or simply playing by the "rules" that you never respond with any efficiency in the beginning stages of a potential relationship. Bullsh*t, I decided. Skeptical and still a bit angry over my very recent dating history, seemingly ill-fated to saddle up only with guys that like to keep their options open (unbeknownst to me), I decided that Mr. 5 Day Email Response was a Secret Shopper!

Now, the concept of the Secret Shopper is like the agenda of the Republican party. It’s subtle, basically invisible, and doesn’t make its presence known until it’s absolutely impossible to right that wrong. Just because someone has bellied up to the bar beside you, or invited you to dinner, or even having done something as simple as picked up the phone to call you, this doesn’t mean that this person’s mind is made up. They are constantly keeping score on mental ratings cards. They are placing values between 1 and 5 (1 being absolutely disgusting and 5 being above exception) on everything you do. In what you say, what you wear, who you know, where you live, tallies are being kept. Values are being placed on everything about you so that that person can go home and stack your performance against those of your competitors.

What makes this such an outrage to me is the simple fact that I, based on someone merely agreeing to hang out with me, forget that the whole world of dating is a capitalistic, competitive fight to the death. I forget that there are MANY people out there who do actually eat at the Spaghetti Warehouse for the roundabout assurance that they would definitely rather be eating at Applebee’s. I don’t quite understand this. When I want something, I go get it. If I’m craving Starbucks I don’t go to Jamba Juice just to prove to myself how much I did actually want Starbucks. And I certainly wouldn’t waste the good people at Jamba Juice’s time because of my retarded logic behind ever making up my mind.

I realize that the paranoia surrounding everyone out there in the dating world being Secret Shoppers is the last stop on the train to being a card-carrying spinster, but I don’t care. I rather like the idea of being guarded, of planning every new relationship to last only until the guy hops back on Myspace. Because I know what I’m worth. And they’re not going to get anything like this anywhere else in town. So happy shopping, jerks.