That feeling when you did a shop for $10...

That feeling when you did a shop for $10, and now it's on the board for $20....Ugh! Who else keeps a record of shop pricing trends so you learn not to jump at the lower end of the scale, next time?

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It's really not a problem if you take the job at the lower price IF it fit your requirements. Sure we all would want more. All jobs don't increase, you could wait and $10 fits someone else's requirement.

A Dad shopping the Ark-LA-Tex and beyond.

Frankly, I don't recall EVER taking a job for $10.

But I know exactly what you mean.

I accepted a Samantha offer on MF for $25 for a gas station. Even though I followed the directions for accepting the offer, the job remained on the board with "make an offer". They ended up paying another shopper $40 to do it (because she called me and told me!). Pretty unhappy about it.

I only accepted it for $25 because it was a straight MS, and I was actually going to be in that town that day for other shops.

@ceasesmith wrote:

Frankly, I don't recall EVER taking a job for $10.

I don't do $10 shops, either, for the most part. If it's a $10 fee on top of a reimbursement for a meal at a restaurant I want to eat at, that's different. LOL.

There are some shops on the Ipsos board for $11 that used to pay $12 or $14, but they seem to always get bonused at the end of the month. I'll wait 'til then and see what the bonus is.

As an aside, I can't believe it when I see shop fees being reduced from what they were when I started doing this five or six years ago. It's not like the cost of living has gone down or anything....

I learn something new every day, but not everyday!
I've learned to never trust spell-check or my phone's auto-fill feature.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2019 12:57PM by BirdyC.

Like a dummy I did a cheapie comic book shop that I later regretted. It sounded ok at the time - $10 (roughly) shop fee + $12-15 reimbursement = ~ $25 ? Not realizing that if the cashier is adhering to the rules, they would not sell me the targeted item and I will have done the entire shop for next to nothing.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2019 01:06PM by Monk-N-Nut.

$10 more than pays for a large portion of yummy treat which is obtained in less than two minutes (unless the popular place has a line). You do not get to know where this is, because this is the only assignment that I will want forever...

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. - Lao-Tzu

@Shop-et-al wrote:

You do not get to know where this is, because this is the only assignment that I will want forever...

LOL.

I'll work for $10 if it's for food, but that's it.

I learn something new every day, but not everyday!
I've learned to never trust spell-check or my phone's auto-fill feature.

Ah, but then again, what if it is a really short "fun and easy" shop, LOL? I actually do some $6 gas station kiosk shops that take 5 minutes to do including the report time using the app on my phone (about 10 questions, 2 photos, no names, no descriptions, no narratives). They reimburse $5 in gas as well. And I also do convenience stores that pay less than $10...they only take 5-10 minutes to do and can be reported on the app. But $10 shops that require much detail are awful.

@Monk-N-Nut wrote:

Like a dummy I did a cheapie comic book shop that I later regretted. It sounded ok at the time - $10 (roughly) shop fee + $12-15 reimbursement = ~ $25 ? Not realizing that if the cashier is adhering to the rules, they would not sell me the targeted item and I will have done the entire shop for next to nothing.

Not understanding your accounting. 10.00 fee + reimbursement (out of pocket) is still 10.00 profit. The fee didn't increase. What am I missing? ? ?

A Dad shopping the Ark-LA-Tex and beyond.

The value of a purchase if you love comic books or know someone close to you who loves them.

@Monk-N-Nut: My first comic book shop was at a now-defunct location. I loved the store, and it was a gas to do the little shop within it. My second comic book shop was at a different, re-purposed location. My third comic book shop was at a new location for the owners. This was interesting, but it was not as fun as the one in the store that I loved.

Was it worth the fee? I suppose so. I forget what else I did on those work days, but the range of comic book store experiences, on average, was easy for a person who loves books and by extension loves comic books. One was in a beloved place. That was a total win for me regardless of anything. Another was in a closed place and I spent too much time taking pics to document the situation. I really wanted to flee and change my name! The third one was just right. If comic books were bears, this shop would have been the Baby Bear in the little tale.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. - Lao-Tzu

I'm not big on comic books. The $10 shop fee + reimbursement would have potentially amounted to MORE, if the item did well on eBay, offsetting the tedium of standing across the street waiting for cars and pedestrians to move so I could get a couple clear shots of the storefront.....in triple digit heat. She said, in her never ending, run on sentence.

That actually was a long sentence, but not a run-on sentence.

Kind of a related theme. At one gas station I had to note if the employee told me the product I was buying was 2 for 1.
I would be disappointed if they failed to mention it as then I only got 1 of the item! lol
Requirements have changed now.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2019 03:35PM by prince.

Yeah, I had a few convenience store shops where they had a special buy 2 get 1 free and I had to take 2 items to the register. There were several times they failed to tell me that I could get a 3rd item for free, even though it was clearly displayed on the monitor screen that the 3rd item was free. I wasn't allowed to say anything.

Thank you JAS - I feel like I need to pay more attention to my chicken pecking in this forum, than regular chats.

@JASFLALMT wrote:

That actually was a long sentence, but not a run-on sentence.

Just got back from doing a 9.00 job two minutes from house, took 8 minutes total. No I'm not embarrassed. found out info. for a new improved printer and talk about easy, doing another later today.

Live consciously....

Sometimes when new shops that I haven't seen before pop up, I'll do one if they seem interesting to me. Even if the fee is low, I consider it an investment in my business: How much time does this shop take? Is it really as interesting as it seemed before I did it? Are there lots of locations near me that will be shopped? What fee would make this worthwhile for me to take and how often would I be comfortable doing it?

I've found lots of jobs that I really like this way. I've learned that some shops aren't bad, but need to be bonused to make them worthwhile to me. And I've learned which shops to avoid this way, too.

The real value of that $10 shop might be the knowledge that you learn about that particular shop (which can be extended to shops like it), and not the 10 bucks. If it was bonused this month, maybe it will be bonused again next month! And if you've done one before, the scheduler might be more likely to give it to you with a bonus. Either way, you know more now than you did before you did the job.

Shopper in California's Bay Area

@CaliGirl925 wrote:

The real value of that $10 shop might be the knowledge that you learn about that particular shop (which can be extended to shops like it), and not the 10 bucks. If it was bonused this month, maybe it will be bonused again next month! And if you've done one before, the scheduler might be more likely to give it to you with a bonus. Either way, you know more now than you did before you did the job.

When I first started shopping, I did a lot of low-fee shops to "learn the ropes" and because I needed to establish good relationships with MSCs so that I could eventually get bonused shops. It was worth it, but I learned that not many $10 shops in my area were worth the amount of time involved. Having said that, there was a convenience store shop that popped up in my e-mail for $12; I'd have gladly taken that. But it got grabbed (probably immediately). The same MSC has one for $8, but I won't do that one.... I will, though, take a low-fee coffee-shop shop with reimbursement for coffee and a pastry -- LOL.

I learn something new every day, but not everyday!
I've learned to never trust spell-check or my phone's auto-fill feature.

Sage advice, BirdyC.

Exactly @BirdyC... there are some $10 shops that aren't worth doing even with a large bonus. And some that I like doing for $10 and will scoop up as many as I can. Some jobs I can tell I won't like just by reading the scheduler post and the requirements. But some gems I wouldn't have found if I hadn't tried out what seemed like an interesting but low paying job.

Shopper in California's Bay Area

I am trying to figure out the value of a shop being offered for no fee but $5 reimbursement where you need to use a store coupon. What can one find at one of the national retailers that is less than $5 and the coupon would work with? I just don't see why anyone would take these shops or why the mystery shop site accepted the assignment from the client in the first place.

Coming from someone who types posts on her phone when half asleep and makes a lot of typos when doing so, I am not going to judge anyone as long as I can understand what they are writing. I might give someone a hard time in a joking manner, or I might be critical of someone's writing if they are being obnoxious. But not you.

@Monk-N-Nut wrote:

Thank you JAS - I feel like I need to pay more attention to my chicken pecking in this forum, than regular chats.

@JASFLALMT wrote:

That actually was a long sentence, but not a run-on sentence.

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That feeling when you did a shop for $10...

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