Mystery Shopper Benchmarking of Durable-Goods Chains and Stores

Abstract

With increased attention being paid to retail performance, a considerable amount of academic work has been devoted to the assessment of retail services. This work has moved beyond an initial reliance on classical test theory methods to the more managerially relevant perspective provided by generalizability theory and begun to compare the quality of data provided by customers with that collected by mystery shoppers. However, initial work on mystery shopping is limited to the evaluation of individual retail outlets, not retail chains, and to convenience-goods retailers, where personal selling is of only minor importance. This article examines the psychometric quality of mystery shopping data for retail chains and durable-goods retailers. At issue are whether more visits are required to evaluate retail chains than individual stores and whether the more extended period of sales interaction characteristic of durable retailing increases or reduces the number of shopper visits needed to make reliable decisions when evaluating retailers.