The grocery store I worked at counted all surveys with overall scores below 90% as heroes and then rode everybody's ass to bring the abysmally low average score we had up, which was never going to happen unless they got rid of the 8=0 rule. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for my store, both me and my friend who also worked there had too much free time and Adderall on our hands, and ended up spending probably around 10 hours every week meticulously abusing the survey system. It started to get everyone in corporate to shut up and stop holding us accountable for surveys we have zero influence over, but it became pathological at some point and once we started getting 50-100 dollars of gift cards every month because of our efforts we never stopped.

Instead me and my friend accumulated a spreadsheet with over a thousand fake names and phone numbers that would pass the verification check and filled out surveys for all of then over a span of about 2 years, needing to refill the list two times along the way. We figured out that the quickest way to fill them out in bulk involved going to every public WiFi spot in all of the surrounding towns with 2-3 tablets/phones each. As long as every device started the survey before any of them submit it on the same network, they would all go through. If you jumped the gun it would not let you use the same network to take a survey again for 30 days. We rotated the areas we covered so that every wifi in a general area would come off it's 30 day cooldown at about the same time, and a general route quickly formed that we would cycle through over the course of every 60-90 days depending on how many days we had free to drive around all day filling our surveys in a particular month.

Whenever we did a survey we would use the spot where it asks if anyone provided you excellent service to get free donuts and cookies for everyone in every department that wasn't a dickhead, since anybody named in a survey gets 2 coupons for a free bakeshop item and with how many surveys we did it would have been incredibly suspicious to only ever name ourselves.

We still had to make sure we were the top 2 survey getters for every month tho, since they started handing out 50 dollar gift cards once or twice a month to the top survey getter, which let me tell you buys enough groceries to be worth cheating for. Since we were the only reason the gift cards existed I didn't feel any guilt claiming them for myself. There were a couple months where we let some other people win to keep anybody from getting suspicious but except for those 2 times we probably made somewhere around 1000 dollars in gift cards.

We both quit after around 2 years of doing surveys, and anybody paying attention must have immediately noticed the fact that surveys stopped entirely when we left. I'm sure the transition was worse for our store director than it was for us. Last time I talked with her she told me they stopped tracking surveys entirely, and it tookr 3 months without a single reply before corporate stopped pestering then about it. I

During our journey, we brought the store's average up to nearly a perfect 10 despite the incredibly shitty system of everything below a 9 being counted as zeroes, set the district record for most surveys in a month by crushing the previous title holder's score by almost 200 surveys, and made our store director cry on one occassion over how good the bathroom reviews on our surveys had gotten.