I did a route of shops today. 6 different companies. Time from leaving home till getting back. 6.5 hours. Paperwork (surveys) about 3 hours. 100 miles on my car. Total if all accepted and they will be ( I read the directions) 183.00. I am brand new. Did my first set on 1-5-17. The paperwork will go much faster down the road.

Where is the downside. I can't find it.

What am I missing?

Dan

Nice work.

That sounds like a good day. There isn't a downside if you do your shops properly. I did an oil change shop that was bonused recently and I did a hardware store nearby with a bonus too. The oil change shop paid $130 plus $58 for the oil. The bonus hardware store was $50 + $1 purchase. I made $180 in three hours total with wait time and reports. Now, that's atypical but it can and does happen for some of us! I did a tool audit for $200 that only took me 3.5 hours including report times. We all have different experiences and it's great to get the goodies in Now, on a down side, today, I earned about $99 for 11 hours of work but I was in need of the cash, groceries, and good graces with a few new companies.

I am getting ready to do site inspects. I honestly see 200 to 300 a day once I know what I am doing. I am a pessimist. You know like "make 30 an hour for uber" I researched and found out the what they really make.

I have been trying to find the downside and I can't. Apartment shops at 45. A phone call to schedule and 30 minutes for the tour. Half hour for the report. Grab easy stuff on the way.

I am stoked.

Sorry, this is my calling. I was in sales for 25 years. I already have all my back stories for this.

If someone can tell me the downside please do now.

Great job! The only downside, which is fairly minor, is that you can have days like that all the time.

Every now and then there will be frustrating mis-steps and screw ups by a scheduler or you or both. Locations will turn out to be closed, addresses incorrect, targets unresponsive or who dodge you once you are on site, foggy guidelines, picky editors, or just plain foul ups. Other than that, the big effort will be to consistantly find well paid assignments and to build your rep with schedulers to where you get called before the best job ever go onto the job board.

Great job supra!

You'll have days when everything goes sideways. Thankfully, those days are few and far between.

@87Supra wrote:

If someone can tell me the downside please do now.

The forum is riddled with horror stories of shops gone wrong, unavailable targets at apartment complexes, closed locations, wrong addresses, ;last minute cancellations. Then Mother Nature likes to throw her two cents in and of course traffic accidents and road closures which will throw a monkey wrench into your perfectly planned schedule.

One of my friends was supposed to do a 13-shop airport route last Friday at FLL. We all know what happened. How do you think his day went?

If you are doing this part time, a $200 day once a month is great. Personally, I prefer to rest on my days of. Fortunately I have a decent full time job at the moment.

If you are doing this full time; 10 hour days including driving 100 miles a day is very punishing five to six days a week. But at least you are making $50k a year IF you have a full plate set up every week.

Probably the biggest downside is rotations. Depending on the MSC and the client you may not be able to revisit a location for 30, 45, 60, 90 or 366 days. And there are even locations that are 'once and done', never to shop there again.

@Flash wrote:

Probably the biggest downside is rotations. Depending on the MSC and the client you may not be able to revisit a location for 30, 45, 60, 90 or 366 days. And there are even locations that are 'once and done', never to shop there again.

The once and never again like my $200+ carpet cleaning job that only required pictures. I got my whole house shampooed, it was awesome

Downside? What downside?!?!?

"I love all my jobs. I don't love when carefully arranged job schedules are discombobulated because of weather and other factors." This is the opening of my wee musing from earlier today. I named the essay, "Scheduler and Schedulerer" because it is embarrassing to deal with my current and proposed revised schedule.

Just now, roads are closed and I cannot work in town or out of town. I am scheduled to work in town and out of town. I am ready. I am willing. I am able. I am thwarted! Stymied! Stuck!

Mind you, I love schedulers! They must deal with me, the weather surrounding me, and who-knows-what else in their worlds. I just wouldn't want to be a scheduler for my part of the world. I suppose that many shoppers in my region are cancelling or re-scheduling and otherwise being time-consuming for the schedulers. Bless them for they deal with us.

Be kind to your schedulers. Their worlds are busy. The future hasn't happened yet, and you may need to work closely with them in order to have any shopping days at all, let alone to have any repeats of the lucrative day that was mentioned in the opening post.

And then there are days like yesterday. Four of the six places I was to evauate were closed. That means half pay instead of full pay. Could not call ahead because these are sites without individual phone numbers available to the public. That left me with 3 hours to kill before check-in was permitted for my overnight hotel shop. The good news is that my overnight hotel shop included a very, very good dinner, with wine, that did not require a report. The bad news is that the thermostat in the hotel room malfunctioned and the temp went to 78 F overnight. (I am not allowed to complain about anthing on site!) And, there ws nothing chocolate available for dessert!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2017 12:39PM by walesmaven.

@walesmaven, wine vs. chocolate. Which one is the winner?

The downside for me is usually traffic. A simple route can turn into a nightmare where I live. The other downside is when the pictures just will not load and the simple report takes forever because of slow internet or the MSC's site is not working properly. Those are my biggest complaints but I do love those days when everything runs like clockwork.

As I see others have posted, there are tons of things that can go wrong. Weather, roads, editors, schedulers, and many other things can go amiss. A guideline could tell you to do one thing, while the editor tells you that you were supposed to do something else entirely. One of the biggest obstacles is going to be the people you have to interact with. Some people are puppies while others are piranhas. Oh, and of course there are always wolves in sheep clothing on these shops.

Some employees may be having a great day, others may be having a bad day. We just have to stay objective and go with it as it's happening so we can report accurately what a customer is going through. I had a cashier who slammed my change into my hand and "accidentally" dropped my receipt without offering to pick it up and hand it to me. I didn't know her, she had to be 10-12 years younger than me and in high school, and there's no chance I knew any of her relatives. She was just in a bad mood and when I reported it, I had to answer half a dozen questions about it... I thought I explained how she dropped the receipt, mumbled, sighed, and slammed the money down thoroughly the first five times, but a sixth "is there video surveillance at this location" wrapped things up for me and I got a 9/10 on the shop. Would I shop there again? Yep. The money was good, the products were appreciated, and the other three associates I spoke to were excellent.

Good luck to find routes every single day.....

@87Supra wrote:

I did a route of shops today. 6 different companies. Time from leaving home till getting back. 6.5 hours. Paperwork (surveys) about 3 hours. 100 miles on my car. Total if all accepted and they will be ( I read the directions) 183.00. I am brand new. Did my first set on 1-5-17. The paperwork will go much faster down the road.

Where is the downside. I can't find it.

What am I missing?

Dan

100 MILES = $55

$183.00 - $55.00 = $128.00

$128.00 / 10 HOURS = $12.80 / HOUR

Just slightly above minimum wage.

Depends on your cost of living if that's a good deal for you or not.

The only down side for me is getting tired. Being a single parent with some minor health issues, I have to schedule what I can which is pretty busy, and deal with reports after kids are all set. Sometimes I run on 5 to 6 hours of sleep and then I pay for it with really tired days and have to play catch up. Because as we all know, there will be a desert of shops, (dry, nothing lol) and then suddenly you are booked solid for a week. So the good with the bad, and overall I totally love it. Unlike former business work which was so stressful, my boss never calls me (MSC), unless he/she wants to beg me to go to work that day for more money.

I guess it also depends on your state. Some of them are still sitting at $7.25. If you're used to making $7.25 for only 27 hours a week (ya know, so they get out of the insurance offering requirements) then $12.80 starts to look nice

@walesmaven wrote:

And then there are days like yesterday. Four of the six places I was to evauate were closed. That means half pay instead of full pay. Could not call ahead because these are sites without individual phone numbers available to the public. That left me with 3 hours to kill before check-in was permitted for my overnight hotel shop. The good news is that my overnight hotel shop included a very, very good dinner, with wine, that did not require a report. The bad news is that the thermostat in the hotel room malfunctioned and the temp went to 78 F overnight. (I am not allowed to complain about anthing on site!) And, there ws nothing chocolate available for dessert!

I would have stuffed some chocolate bars in my bag!

They might have melted

Get one of those plug in Igloo coolers.

I was offered my first hotel shop last weekend but I had to decline. I have to have a high speed WiFi connection and be hard wired to my personal VPN network when I'm logged into work and I couldn't do it at the hotel. I'm required to have a desktop or laptop with a second monitor, two screens at 17 inches, a hard wired keyboard and mouse, and a particular type of headset... with 10GB up and 10GB down.. 0_o which is fine at my home office...but doesn't make well for travel. Anyway...

Bummer, because I'm curious to get my hands dirty and try some hotel shops!

She might have wanted to crawl in it if it was 78.

@2stepps wrote:

Get one of those plug in Igloo coolers.

@SoCalMama wrote:

@87Supra wrote:

I did a route of shops today. 6 different companies. Time from leaving home till getting back. 6.5 hours. Paperwork (surveys) about 3 hours. 100 miles on my car. Total if all accepted and they will be ( I read the directions) 183.00. I am brand new. Did my first set on 1-5-17. The paperwork will go much faster down the road.

Where is the downside. I can't find it.

What am I missing?

Dan

100 MILES = $55

$183.00 - $55.00 = $128.00

$128.00 / 10 HOURS = $12.80 / HOUR

Just slightly above minimum wage.

Depends on your cost of living if that's a good deal for you or not.

I don't know about you, but to me, the $.55 a mile is for TAX purposes. It actually costs me ten cents a mile to operate my old clunker. And before I was doing this, I was commuting 50 miles each way, thus putting 500 miles a week on my car -- and no one was reimbursing gas, and none of it generated a tax deduction.

And when the only jobs available are minimum wage, $12 an hour can look pretty good.

SoCalMama, I liked how you calculated the figures.

The downside will be if you do not get the same dollar amount shops everyday. $183 for one day. That's pretty good. So if you had $183 x 30 days = $5490.00 per month, that will be pretty impressive.

My brought used, gas efficient car also costs about 10 cents per mile to run. It is extremely reliable, oil changes and tire rotations paid for by shops, and is slated for its first tune-up at 105000 miles. The 55 cents per mile assumes a vehicle that was bought new and has average reliability and effciency. Why would a smart shopper use such a vehicle, one might ask?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2017 06:19PM by walesmaven.

It definitely gives a new perspective when you realize you were spending $40 a week or more on gasoline to drive to a job, and now you're spending little to nothing a week on shops depending on if you do gas stations. My new job is home based and online, so anywhere I go is leisure. Mystery shopping has truly burned less gas money than I spent traveling as a restaurant manager. The stores would send us where ever they wanted without any gasoline reimbursement if someone quit... and people quit all the time 0_o