My Best Friend Of Five Years Turned Out To Be A Mystery Shopper Surveilling My Consumer Habits
Our friendship was built on quality control.
It’s traumatizing enough when a friendship ends, but it’s so much worse when that friendship turns out to be a complete sham.
It’s hard to explain what it feels like when you find out that your best friend, the woman who served as an avatar at your Zoom wedding, who held back your hair when you puked in a public bathroom stall, and who neatly tailed you in Bloomingdale’s, was merely a mystery shopper hired by the marketing division of a department store.
As I sit here wondering how I missed so many red flags, I ask myself: “Did I ever truly know Emme?” Well, for starters, that’s not her name, apparently. It’s “M,” the first letter of her employee ID. The M stands for “marketing.” And so I ask myself again: “Did I ever truly know Marketing?” No, I didn’t. But she sure had me pegged, based on the prevailing trends of my demographic.
We met in Sephora, like most women who become BFFs after college. I dropped an eyeshadow palette and we both bent down to pick it up, bonking our heads together. It was a platonic romcom. She laughed and suggested I go with something brighter, like Urban Decay. When I got up to the counter to pay, I told them which salesperson helped me. The cashier said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We never help anyone.”
The rest of the clues were more obvious, like the time she bought lingerie from Sears. Or the summer she got engaged and her bridal registry was just a list of twenty different brands of blenders from Macy’s. We saw “Aquaman” together at the Cineplex, and whenever I laughed, she wrote something down in her Moleskine. “You know what’s really funny?” she whispered. “I keep forgetting if you consider yourself Latina.”
Part of the deception that hurts the most is that she wasn’t tracking my purchases at all. She was too busy assessing overall product quality.
Maybe I should try patching things up with Marketing. Sure, she monitors store employees and rates their performances like a total creep. But on the other hand, she’s a vital part of retail quality control. Plus, she has some of my most sensitive and private information, and could easily destroy me. Being vulnerable to blackmail from my friends has always been something that makes me feel super close to them.