Restaurants : Food Spies: The Counter Measures

“We warn them: When your friends are out partying on Saturday night, you’ll be in Pittsburgh--putting thermometers in chicken.”

-- Manager, intelligence operations for Kentucky Fried Chicken

Nobody said the life of a spy is easy.

There’s the travel. There’s the anonymity. There’s the fear of being caught.

And then there’s all that food.

At least there is in the growing intelligence community of “secret shoppers” that has sprung up in recent years in response to intense competition among restaurant and fast-food chains.

Banks, car dealers, and even Disneyland have used secret shoppers, but spies have become increasingly popular over the last two years with fast-food and dinner-house chains. That segment of the restaurant industry racked up more than $55 billion in sales in 1986, and chains are more than willing to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $650,000 a year on food spies to maintain their market shares.

Preventive Inspection

The idea is to spot the dirty floors and the unkempt hamburgers--secret shoppers give Big Macs grades on lettuce placement--before customers are turned off and turn away. A $10 to $75 investment in a secret inspection could prevent the loss of thousands of consumer dollars.

The results of secret surveys have also sparked such innovations as Styrofoam hamburger containers and self-serve soft drink machines.

So if there’s a pot-bellied guy with sunglasses and a hat pulled low taking a quick bite out of a burrito at a Del Taco stand and tossing the rest aside while he examines the trash dumpster, it’s a good bet he’s Del Taco’s sole secret shopper on one of his long, lonely spy missions.

National Staff

Or if there’s a young man or woman parked in a secluded spot measuring biscuits or comparing a drumstick’s skin to a color chart, that’s probably one of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s national staff of well-traveled secret shoppers.

Some of the other people out there taking notes on smiles of the sales staff--a Taco Bell worker can lose points if his or her teeth aren’t showing--could be working for one of a growing number of independent companies who charge from about $12 to $30 for each secret restaurant survey.

And then there are the double agents--secret shoppers double-checking the results of other secret shoppers.

While some of the spying is informal, the food spy game is going increasingly high tech.

A Kentucky Fried Chicken mystery shopper, for example, will drive a few blocks with his food and then pull out a device that looks like a cross between a long flashlight and a handgun.

“This device scares people,” said Jenny Birge, the chain’s quality assurance manager who used to be a secret shopper herself. The device, a refractometer, measures the sugar content of soft drinks. “People see you doing this and they ask you to move,” Birge said.

Kentucky Fried Chicken sleuths also stick thermometers into their chicken. An outlet gets bad marks for a drumstick that goes below 135 degrees within five minutes of purchase. Plastic rulers are used to make sure biscuits are at least 2 1/2-inches tall. “A bad biscuit is a flat biscuit,” a spokesman for the chain said.

Shoppers for other chains--such as Newport Beach-based Wienerschnitzel International and Orange-based Naugles Inc. and Miami-based Burger King Corp.--use another important performance-measuring device: the stopwatch. If orders are not filled within three to five minutes, someone is going to get a bad report card.

And spies for the 2,600 units of Irvine-based Taco Bell travel with a scale to weigh tacos.

Fed Into Computer

Not surprisingly, the result of all this spying, measuring and poking often goes into yet another high-tech device--a computer. Restaurant managers working for Irvine-based Restaurant Enterprises Group (formerly Grace Restaurant Co.) and Anaheim’s Carl Karcher Enterprises can find themselves faced with a computer profile of their outlet’s shopper performance for the last year. Management then offers suggestions or instructions for improvement.

“It’s a mere matter of checks and balances,” said Ray Perry, vice president of operations for Karcher, the operator of Carl’s Jr. fast-food restaurants. The regular surveys are “kind of a snapshot once a month.”

They are also a strong motivational tool. “They tend to be a deterrent (to sloppy work) because employees know you use them from time to time,” said Randy Howath, president of the Irvine-based Rusty Pelican chain of seafood dinner houses.

Several companies deny bonuses to outlet managers if their restaurants do not do well in the secret shopper visits. Naugles’ managers, for example, don’t get cost-control bonuses, which can be up to 20% of their salaries, if their secret shopper scores drop below 90 out of a perfect 100.

Naugles spends more than $6,000 a month on its shopper reports, which cost $10 to $15 each. The intelligence-gathering program began after the chain was purchased nine months ago by Collins Foods. At the time, Naugles had lost nearly $28 million since July, 1983.

“We had our own gut feelings about what was wrong, but we needed an outside source,” said Dennis Boylin, a Naugles vice president. “The mystery shopper was the best tool to find out what was wrong.”

Poor Service Found

The spies confirmed management’s suspicions, Boylin said. “Naugles’ food was excellent and cleanliness was pretty good, but service was relatively poor. People didn’t seem to be glad the customer was there.”

Now they had better be glad because they may be secretly graded on their gladness at any given time. The company is so happy with the intelligence-gathering program that it now uses two independent secret shopper companies to check each other’s results.

At Taco Bell’s 2,660 outlets, overall shopper ratings have climbed at least 40% since the chain started almost weekly inspections 2 1/2 years ago, said Michael Guido, regional vice president for Southern California. And customer treatment, he said, absolutely makes a difference in the bottom line.

Nobody is checking to see how glad the food spies are, though, which may be a good thing because the life of a professional taster can be difficult indeed.

Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Birge remembers days of smelling like chicken while she was a spy with a car trunk full of red and white boxes. They can’t be kept in the front seat, Birge explains, or else store employees will get suspicious. And they can’t be thrown away because an overlooked thermometer may have to be retrieved from a dumpster.

The chain’s current spies, who range in age from 22 to 36 and earn an entry-level salary of about $17,500 a year plus all the chicken they can eat, work 10 to 12 days in a row on the road and then have five days off.

“It can get lonely,” Birge noted, and the men seem to take it harder than the women.

So the company tries to hire shoppers who enjoy reading. “They’re more comfortable than people who say they like to play racquetball three times a week,” Birge explained.

Boredom isn’t the only problem for those who make a living by eating. Mystery shoppers also have to chomp through all that food.

One chicken shopper put on 40 pounds in a couple of months.

A silent overseer for one dinner house had another culinary problem: She sometimes was assigned to test the catch of the day, but she hates fish. “I’d bring my sister along to order it, then make like I had it,” she admitted.

Meals Limited

An independent shopper company, Operation Success Inc. of Philadelphia, which does surveys for Restaurant Enterprises Group, limits its spies to one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner mission per day. “How objective can you be if you’d had six lunches today?” asked Marvin Fuller, president and owner.

A Marie Callender shopper noted another problem that all spies must contend with: how to keep their identities secret from the people they’re spying on.

There are assorted techniques.

The Callender spy, when asked once to keep an eye on a bartender suspected of tapping the till, turned into a Southern belle from the K mart across the street. The pretense was necessary because she was afraid of being recognized since Marie Callender’s “pie spies” also have other full-time jobs with the Newport Beach-headquartered chain.

One drawback to that disguise was a misinterpretation of her business--one customer “just wouldn’t give up” trying to pick her up, she said.

Del Taco’s shopper wears sunglasses and carries a leather briefcase full of hats to vary his appearance. The reason, he explained, is that if he is spotted, other nearby Del Taco managers are likely to get calls warning them that a mystery shopper is on the way.

There are also more mundane tricks of the trade. Burger King shoppers have hidden their stopwatches in newspapers and a Sizzler spy said she always wears a long-sleeved blouse to hide her note-taking pen up her sleeve, then takes notes on a folded napkin.

But food spies invariably are caught, at one time or another.

The spies usually know that their tricks and disguises have not worked when store employees suddenly are especially nice or especially nervous.

“It’s very embarrassing to be sixth in line and be served first,” Birge said.

“You can always tell,” added Earl W. Scott, owner of Dorel Marketing Service of Long Beach, one of the growing number of independent shopper companies. “They’ll start sneaking around in back, being overly friendly, then suggest everything on the menu. You’ve already ordered fries and they’re still saying, ‘Do you want fries.’ ”

Dorel, whose clients include about 170 Naugles and 10 Polly’s Pies, employs about 150 mostly part-time spies who probably aren’t recognized that often because they come from surprisingly varied walks of life. Among Dorel’s secret shoppers are a former mayor, actors, teachers, a bank president, dentists, and several hungry lawyers, Scott said.

Commercial Service Systems Inc. of Van Nuys, which has been in the mystery shopper business for 40 years, hires part-time eaters for between $5 and $10 an hour.

Both seem to be doing better than ever. Dorel’s revenue last year was $100,000--including substantial reimbursements for food purchases--and business appears to be increasing. So does the number of competitors.

‘Bombarded by Companies’

“Most of us are fairly bombarded by companies” offering secret shoppers, said the operator of a large Orange County-based dinner-house chain. “We get solicitations of some sort two or three times a month.”

The business is there because restaurant executives are convinced that the programs are worthwhile.

“Often, we can sit in our offices, having meeting after meeting thinking we’re doing the right thing,” noted David Locke, vice president of food and beverages for Restaurant Enterprises Group. “We don’t necessarily know if it’s being translated out in the restaurant.” The group operates 116 dinner houses, including the Reuben’s and Charley Brown’s chains.

Nonetheless, there are some skeptics.

“It’s a transient business where (many of) the workers are kids,” noted Barbara Dawson, West Coast editor of Restaurants and Institutions, a trade magazine based in Des Plaines, Ill. “If I fire someone from my KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) because he’s been rude to a customer, he’ll go down and work for Burger King or Taco Bell.”

But industry executives point to several innovations that came about at least partly as a result of shopper surveys.

New Container

McDonald’s, for example, learned it had a problem maintaining the temperature of its hamburgers, so it introduced Styrofoam containers. Burger King found that hungry diners felt they were waiting too long, so multiple cashiers and self-service drink machines are going into their restaurants.

Felt Neglected

And Restaurant Enterprises discovered that customers felt neglected when they were not greeted as they entered a restaurant. As a result, the company’s outlets now make sure that two hosts or hostesses are stationed just inside the door at peak hours.

Another result is a sort of counterespionage.

“I’ve been in a number of restaurants where I’ve seen my own picture in the back room,” noted John G. Hollingsworth, a Laguna Hills marketing consultant and former president of Straw Hat Pizza. “They’ll get hold of it one way or another and post pictures of the president, the CEO (chief executive officer), and the whole executive committee.”

It’s enough to make you think you’re being watched.