A new Slop University research poster interviews staff at 31 stores of one bakery-café franchise network and finds that none of 214 below-threshold mystery-shop reports names a person, while 208 of the responses filed against them do.
Fifty-eight interviews across 31 bakery-café stores identify five moves by which a below-threshold visit report is answered with an individual
When the score comes back low, the form asks who. The form has never once asked who was standing there.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The Report Names Nobody, a research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, is the study behind that observation. Dr Vasseur, Dr Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Marek Solheim spent nine months among the managers, shift supervisors and counter crew of 31 stores in one bakery-café franchise network, and read the 214 below-threshold visit reports those stores had answered.
Each store’s monthly service score is produced by one unannounced visitor over a median thirteen minutes at the counter. None of the 214 reports names a member of staff. Two hundred and eight of the 214 responses filed against them do. Where a name is supplied, the store’s own roster confirms that the person was present during the recorded visit window in 34 per cent of cases.
The poster sets out five moves by which the conversion happens, and how their shares move when a store falls below threshold twice in a quarter. Reconstructing the roster rises from 21 to 58 per cent of responses; holding the matter over to the next visit falls to 4 per cent. The median response is filed 3.2 hours after the report lands, and 41 minutes before the report’s own note on what a single visit can carry is first opened.
The work extends a line of School inquiry concerned less with the numbers an organisation produces than with the paperwork assembled around them. “There is a version of this study waiting behind every form that carries a field for a name,” Dr Oyelaran said, “and we would be glad to see somebody else write one.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ptihzp.