I Hired a Team of Secret Shoppers to Find Out How Businesses Were Opening in Dallas. It's Not Good.

I Hired a Team of Secret Shoppers to Find Out How Businesses Were Opening in Dallas. It’s Not Good.

Mark Cuban's Weblog

Posted on May 7, 2020
I wanted to get an understanding of what opening meant to businesses around Dallas. Were they opening? What precautions were they taking? Were employees in safe environments? And bigger picture, I wanted to know if these are places that I would feel safe taking my family to.
So I hired a company that specialized in this type of project, https://shiftsmart.com/, and asked them to let me know how Dallas businesses were responding to the Open Order for Texas.
We will do this again a couple more times so we can learn what the trends are and try to learn from it.

This is what we found:
Methodology:
We called ~1000 restaurant and retail locations based on popularity (we used # of reviews on Yelp by category as a proxy) to assess full re-open rate (open for dine-in, in-person shopping etc.)
We conducted physical audits at ~300 locations across restaurants and retail locations in Dallas to assess compliance against state re-opening protocols

Overview:
1)Re-opening Rate: Only 36% of businesses chose to open on the opening weekend. Media coverage, showcasing owner sentiment and infection statistics, paint a picture of a large degree of latent fear in the marketplace.

2) Aggregate Degree of Safety Protocol Compliance – By Locations: Overall – 96% of businesses were non-compliant across all mandatory protocols and all locations. The extent of non-compliance is dramatic with ~1/3 of all locations being <50% compliant across mandatory protocols as established by the Governor’s office. The chart below breaks out the degree of compliance across mandatory compliance % buckets.

More at the link.

http://blogmaverick.com/2020/05/07/i-hired-a-team-of-secret-shoppers-to-find-out-how-businesses-were-opening-in-dallas-its-not-good/