Over the course of his decades-long mystery shopping career, Steve Clark has completed more than 20,000 video mystery shops, having worked in 49 U.S. states, including Alaska and Hawaii. Like almost all mystery shoppers, Clark started with traditional mystery shopping jobs, but soon focused his attention on the more lucrative world of video mystery shopping, which requires the use of a hidden video camera to document the customer experience. During a four-year period in which he criss-crossed the country shopping full-time, Clark became one of the best known individuals in the industry, branding himself “Super Shopper Steve,” and sharing his video shopping knowledge via social media.
These days Clark still completes his share of video mystery shopping jobs, but spends most of his time training aspiring video shoppers and selling video shopping equipment at his SuperShoppers Equipment Store. He also owns and operates Louisville, Kentucky-based Quantum Shopping Solutions, which manages video shopping projects for other mystery shopping companies, offering a selection of video shopping jobs, primarily in southern and midwestern states.
I recently connected with Clark at ShopCon ’25, sitting down to chat with him inside Louisville’s Muhammad Ali Center. We talked about everything from: how he started mystery shopping; to how he made the transition to full-time mystery shopper; to how much money one can earn as a video mystery shopper. In the following All Good Points Interview, he also reveals his idea for a mystery shopping reality show, his worst shopping fails, and the name of the A-list celebrity he met while doing a mystery shop.
Steve, how are you enjoying ShopCon ’25?
It’s great. We don’t have enough of these events, where you can get together with other shoppers and pick their brains. I’ve been shopping a long time, and every day I pick up some new piece of information from other shoppers.
How did you get started mystery shopping?
People ask me that a lot, and I’m not quite sure. I think I went into a seafood restaurant called Captain D’s and it had a little sign on the counter that said: ‘Would you like to earn a free meal every month?’ They wanted you to review their meals—they were handling that internally. So, I thought, ‘Great, this is a free meal.’ I’d get my meal, write up a report, and then I started wondering: Is there more out there? Are there more places giving away free things? That got me started.
Was there an ‘a ha’ moment when you realized you could make a living—and ultimately a career—doing this?
Once I found that there were two or three other places [offering shops], I started getting on the Internet, looking around and trying to find others. Then I realized there were mystery shopping companies that had dozens—hundreds—of shops. So, I got started doing it. Some of it was for fun, some of it was free food, and some of them paid twenty or thirty dollars that you could make besides getting the free food.
I understand that mystery shopping has allowed you to see the entire country. You’ve video mystery shopped in all 50 states? Or close to it?
Forty-nine. I know I have been to Montana, I just don’t know if I actually shopped there [laughs].
What was that like—traveling the whole country, mystery shopping along the way?
It all started because for four or five years I was working for my brother’s company, and I would travel to different locations to do conventions. Every week was a different spot; no rhyme or reason, Miami this week, Seattle next week. [My brother] would pay for my hotels and my food, and I found out that there were mystery shops that paid you to visit hotels and paid you to eat out. So now I had my brother reimbursing me for my travel and the mystery shopping company was reimbursing me for my travel, so I’m double-dipping. I thought, this could be a thing, if I ever decided to stop working for my brother.
Do you have a favorite place that video shopping allowed you to see?
Probably New York City. I went there quite a bit, and I was shopping the Polo Ralph Lauren shops. There was one location—their flagship store in New York City—that had four floors. So, it was like men’s department on the first floor, women’s on the second, and then up from there. The neat thing about it was that each floor was considered a separate mystery shop that paid fifty to sixty dollars. So, you would do the men’s department and then get on the elevator and go up and do the next one….
I was there, on the first floor, trying on a suit coat that was like $2,000—this coat that I could probably get at Burlington [Coat Factory] for $100. I heard a voice next to me—a voice I recognized from Hollywood. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger trying on a coat!
Having done thousands of video shops, what are some of the benefits of video mystery shopping?
Volume. That’s the big thing. A nice-paying written shop, there might be only one or two of those a week. But if I’m doing
apartment shops—there are probably ten- to fifteen-thousand of those in the U.S. every three months. So, if I know a video mystery shop is going to be paying $50 minimum, and I can go out and do six, seven or eight shops in a day, there’s the value. It’s not just the higher pay, but the volume of higher paying jobs.
What are some of the disadvantages?
Probably the learning curve—to learn the equipment. [Though] the equipment usually doesn’t fail, the shopper usually fails. I remember one shop I did where I forget to press the record button before I walked in. The power was on, but no record. I did the whole shop, I’m getting ready to turn the record off, and it’s never been turned on.
[The other disadvantage is] in order to get a good volume of shops you are probably going to start traveling a little bit. You’re going to burn up all the shops in your city and wait for more to appear. Might as well go an hour or two away and work in that city all day. That’s how I started traveling across the U.S. I thought, I’ll just keep going, and I never quit until I got to the Pacific.
What skills do you need to be a really good video shopper?
It’s almost the opposite [of what you might expect]. People will say, ‘I’m a really good actor.’ Or ‘I can come up with great scenarios.’ And we have to tone that down. We’re not looking for an actor. We’re looking for someone who can go into whatever kind of shop it is and say, ‘I want to get some information about your …’ fill in the blank. Let that agent do the talking. They are the ones who are supposed to be performing. You’re the sounding board, so you don’t ask questions, you answer questions.
A lot of times—I still have a problem with it after 20,000 shops—I sit in the car and say [to myself], ‘Don’t talk in this shop. Quiet down.’ Because my goal, if you think about it, is to get in and out as fast as possible, making the most dollars per minute that I can make, while still fulfilling the guidelines. You’ve got to do what they tell you to do. But there’s no reason to add on to that with unnecessary conversation.
Someone who is just getting started, do they need an instructor to do this?
I can tell you that I didn’t have an instructor. If somebody wants to do it without an instructor, they can do it like I did it. I floundered around the Internet for three years trying to figure the whole thing out, making more mistakes than anyone I know in the world of video mystery shopping. That’s why I called myself Super Shopper Steve, not because of any acting ability or any special skill. I hit all the roadblocks; I’ve fallen into all the potholes. So, as I train new shoppers I say, ‘Don’t do as I did. Let me tell you what happened and then you’ll become a Super Shopper faster than I did.’
How do you train or instruct video shoppers?
The first thing they have to do is to get used to the equipment. When they get the equipment—the little button camera and DVR—then they need to learn how to use that. We can usually train that in a couple hours. After that, it’s basically just record-stop, record-stop, all day long. Press a button on, press a button off. You still have to know how the equipment works and how to hook it up, but once you learn it, you’ve got it.
Next, we have to talk to them about how to act. So, that gets you going. I can kick you out of the nest right there and have you making money, but you still don’t know everything you need to know.
I tell shoppers: Get out there and make some money and then come back to us and we’ll give you some finer tips to get you the better jobs.
In addition to training new video shoppers, you also have your own company?
I do. I have a smaller mystery shopping company [Quantum Shopping Solutions], and the way I got that is kind of funny. We are a regional company—most of our projects are in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Tennessee and Virginia.
But the way I came about having that company was I just out shopping one day [and] one of the owners called me and said, ‘Hey Steve, what are you doing?’ I said ‘I’m out working, what have you got?’ I thought she was going to give me another job. She said, ‘I’ve got a question for you. I’m going to be selling my mystery shopping company, would you be interested in buying it?’
We talked for six months or so, and all of a sudden I am jumping to the other side of the camera, and instead of having 200 shops that I needed to get done, I had 200 shoppers waiting for me to give them shops to do.
It’s been fun. I think I still enjoy the shopping the most, but I’ve really learned to appreciate training shoppers.
Does your company specialize in any particular kind of shop?
Most of our shops are in three areas: apartments—where you go to an apartment complex and are interested in an apartment; banks—you go into a bank and are interested in getting info about a checking account or a CD or a consolidation loan; and storage facilities, where you go in and say, ‘I am going to be needing to rent a storage unit and want to check out what you guys have.’ All of these are what I call “quick” shops. Maybe 15 minutes for some, 25 for the next, but pretty good money for a 15- or 20-minute shop. As long as you can get to another shop in 30 minutes, making $50 or $60 an hour is pretty good money.
What are the most common video mystery shops? In what industries?
I think apartments is probably the leader, with all the shops all over the U.S. New homes are probably second behind that—if we’re are talking about video. There are also new car shops.
[But] every industry in the U.S. wants to measure their customer service, and that’s all this is about. They can’t send in the district manager because everyone sees him coming a mile away, and they clean up the place. So, it’s got to be you or me. The funny thing is: they know we’re coming. They are told mystery shoppers are coming, they just don’t know which one of their two-thousand customers is going to be the shopper, right? And that’s going to be you, the shopper.
How does someone find video mystery shopping jobs?
The easiest way—and [at SupperShoppers] we help you with giving you names and web sites and scheduler’s names and email addresses—but you basically go online, because all the really good mystery shopping companies will have a job board and a place where you can apply to be a shopper. Once you apply and get approved—very quickly, sometimes within hours—then you are allowed to go to the job board and see what they have in your area and apply for it. And after you do a few shops, sometimes you can self-assign. Press the button and take the shop and go out and make the money. We help you with all of that.
Part of our training is not just to connect you with my company, because maybe you don’t live in the areas where we have lots of shops. My value to the shopper is: I know all the companies, I know all the schedulers, I know the owners, I know the projects, and I am glad to push you away from me and toward them if they have shops in your area.
What kind of equipment do you need?
You are going to need a DVR and a button camera. You wear the hidden button on your shirt, you’ve got the DVR in your pocket, and that’s about it. We show you how to wear the equipment, how to use it and connect it. It’s going to record your video, covertly, onto an SD card and then you pull the SD card out, put it in your laptop and send it to the company that wanted you to do it.
Is there a particular brand [of equipment] that you recommend? Or a brand that video shopping companies require?
[Mystery shopping companies] aren’t really allowed to require a particular brand because you are an independent contractor. They can require what they want in the quality of the video, which kind of backs in to the Lawmate equipment. Lawmate [Technology] has been making covert cameras and body cameras for law enforcement for over 15 years, and this little side industry of video mystery shopping picked up on that. They tried them out and they worked really well, and so every company you talk to, if you are applying to be a mystery shopper, they’ll say ‘What kind of equipment do you have?’ When you say you have Lawmate equipment, they go, ‘Great we are ready to start using you.’
What are some of the things that you can do to avoid a recording fail—be it audio or video?
One of the things that I did, personally, was I decided to become what is known as a two-camera shopper. I wear two button cameras, two DVRs—two redundant systems. They both can’t fail at the same time, can they?
Have they both failed before?
I was going to say, if they do, I should find a new industry to work in. [But yeah], one of my ex-schedulers, who went to work for another company, gave me a job—a new home shop. I had my two cameras, and I met the guy in a trailer because they hadn’t built any homes yet.
[But] I missed the trailer when I was driving by because it was kind of an empty lot and I was looking for an office. I made a circle at the cul-de-sac and started coming back and saw the trailer. I pulled in and parked and got my DVR out and turned the power on and I look up and the guy is coming out the door waving and said, ‘Are you Steve?’ He goes, ‘Come on in, I’ve got everything ready to show you.’
Because of the distraction, I forgot to turn either one from stop to record. I spent an hour and a half with this guy, looking at lots, looking at plans, picking out a home. I come back to turn that recorder off and neither one of them had ever been turned on. I had to call my own employee and tell her that I screwed up, even with two cameras [laughs].
Obviously if you do enough of these shops, you are going to have examples like that. Any other memorable experiences in that vein?
Just a funny one. I was shopping a rental store where you go in to rent TVs and couches and washing machines for a week at a time. I was supposed to look at a washing machine.
I opened the front door, the bell dings like it does in those places when you walk in. And I don’t see anybody. So, I kind of stand there and look around a bit and there isn’t a single person in there. I am saying ‘Hello….?’ I walk back to the counter. ‘Hello…?’ Anyone behind the counter? No. I saw the employee door, it was a swinging door, so I pushed the door and said ‘Anybody back there?’ Nothing. So, I walk over to the washing machine area—the washers and dryers—and walked past a couch and I looked down, and there is the guy, asleep on the couch with his headphones on. He was completely out of it.
I didn’t really want to get him in trouble, so I walked over to a washing machine, raised the lid and let it drop with a thud. He woke up, jumped off the couch and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I fell asleep, how can I help you?’ He was a great salesman after that, but funny things like that happen along the way.
I guess the big question is, what kind of money can you make video mystery shopping?
We talked about that [ShopCon ’25] today, and talking to the shoppers, I said, ‘I can’t tell you how much you can make because I can’t tell you how much you need to make, how much you want to make, what your limitations are. Do you have a full-time job? Or do you have no job? Or kids to take care of?’ It’s going to revolve around your particular situation.
But we talked about how those shops are going to pay a minimum of $50. So you can always back into it. You tell me what you need for the month, and I’ll tell you how much work you have to do. If you say, ‘Steve, I would like to make an extra thousand dollars per month.’
A thousand, divided by $50 for each shop, means you only have to do 20 shops. And you have about 20 workdays during the month. So, you do one 30-minute shop a day, and you pick up a thousand at the end of the month. If you want to make two-thousand, average two shops a day. You want to make five-thousand? Do five shops a day—average. Maybe you do seven on one day and four on another, but average 25 shops a week.
I have started after 12 noon and gotten five shops done. You can usually do one shop in an hour—that counts drive time and shop time. So, however many thousand-dollar paychecks you want at the end of the month, you average that many shops per day. If you really need to make seven- or eight-thousand in a month, then you better do seven or eight shops per day.
What do you say to the naysayers who insist you can’t make a six-figure income doing this? We ran into a lot of people today [at ShopCon ’25] who are making six-figures.
There’s no way you are going to find that out until you do what I did. First, I made a thousand and thought, ‘That was sure easy.’ I am going to try and double up next month and do a few more shops. Then one month I said: You know what, I am going to quit that job with my brother, and I’m going to try doing this full-time.
I called my wife. I said, ‘I’m in Texas, I’m going to stick around here a week. Convention season is over, I’m going to see if I can make a living at this.’ Fifteen days later, I was still in Texas doing shops, and I finally had to tell all those companies, ‘Stop, I don’t live here, I’m going home!’
It was a test. And I told [my wife], I’m going to call my brother and tell him, ‘That’s it.’ I’m ready to do this.’
Of course, my kids are grown, and with 11 grandkids, my wife has a lot of things she wants to do. So, if I’m gone for four or five days, it’s okay.
But I have a lot of fun with it. And I didn’t mention this today [during my presentation], but the way my mind works is: Anywhere I go, if it’s a four day vacation to Tampa with my wife, she knows one of those days, she is at the pool by herself because I am out shopping that day to make enough money to pay for the whole mini-vacation. And I write the whole thing off as a business expense on top of that—because I am there to work.
That’s a really good point. Video shopping—and regular mystery shopping—it travels. You can do it anywhere in the country and you can spend a day shopping and pay for [all or part of] your trip.
You’re absolutely right. And if there’s any TV producers who happen to be [reading this], I would tell them this: I’ve got a great idea for a reality show: You take Super Shopper Steve, you blindfold him, you put him on a plane, and you drop him somewhere in the U.S. at 9 a.m. He doesn’t know where he is going to be. He takes off his blindfold and goes … ‘Kansas City? How am I going to make money here?’ And I get on the phone and call all the schedulers that I know at all the companies and say, ‘I’ve got to have some jobs today.’ I guarantee I could make money, without even knowing where I was going. They are going to say: ‘I’ve got three jobs. Can you get them done today?’ [I’d say] ‘Absolutely.’
… Nobody can stop me from making money. It’s not like a job where a boss says, ‘You’re laid off for a week.’ I determine how much I’m going to make and how much I’m going to work, and when I’m going to work. You think I’m going to work on a night when my grandson is playing his first T-ball game? No!
But if you work that part-time job, and you say I need Thursday night off, [they’ll say], ‘You just started here, you can’t have Thursday night off.’ And you’re going to miss the game. Not me. I’m going to be my own boss, and I am probably harder on myself than that boss would be.
Any last words of advice for someone who is thinking about giving video shopping a try?
Yeah, come to one of our [Super Shopper Steve] live webinars. We do them just about every week, and we’ll answer all your questions. There will be a chat area where you can interrupt me, make fun of me, or do whatever you want to do.
I’ll be presenting everything you ever wanted to know about video mystery shopping, but were afraid to ask. And they’ll be other people in the room. Some of them may already be shopping and making money on the non-video side, and are making the transition over [to video mystery shopping]. We’re there ready to help you, and then when you are ready to get the equipment, we can help you with some packages and training. But the first Webinar is completely free, just check us out.
Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk about all-things-video mystery shopping. Where can people find you online and on social media?
At SuperShoppers.org. Go there and you will immediately see the free Webinar that you can sign up to attend. We do them almost every week—on different days of the week at different times, so it will fit everybody’s schedule.
You can also catch me pretty often on TikTok at SuperShopperSteve. I’m getting a little old for TikTok, I think. It’s like the Wild West. But I enjoy the interaction and take on all the haters and complimenters. We have a lot of fun there.
