I am, as I type this, sitting at the Flamingo working on a report. To start, to point out one error in your post. There aren't any annual fees to shop in Nevada that I am aware of. At least I have never paid any. I only paid for my work card and it's good for 5 (??) years. Something like that. Which reminds me I bet mine is expiring soon. Anyway, if it's a good fit for you depends entirely on what type of shops you like and how you prefer to work. I have done 2 trips here in the past 5 weeks and I will not likely make anymore. I got my work card to do a specific project and it was worthwhile for that. Normally I am a video route shopper. It doesn't work very well for me, for several reasons:
1. Video does not pay more here and often pays less. My last trip here I did 4 new home video shops for $70 each. Doing the exact same shop for the exact same end-MSC and exact same client in every other state has always paid $100+.
2. On the other end, my favorite gas station shop that pays $12 in every single other state pays $18 here. The problem is you can't route shop for $18 shops. At least not making a living.
3. Communication is difficult. Most of the schedulers are difficult to reach at best. One took 3 weeks to reply to my request for shops and then got pissed when she wanted to assign me a bunch of shops and I said no because I had filled up my schedule since she never bothered to confirm. The same scheduler got pissed at me this week because she assigned 2 airport shops at the same time she asked me if I could do them. I replied and told her I would do 1 but wasn't available for the 2nd. She ignored the reply and then got pissed when I brought it up again saying I had agreed to do them. Uh no. I did not.
4. Communication is difficult. Not only are the schedulers hard to reach but you can't bypass them. So if you're doing a shop for Big Huge MSC you can't just email Big Huge MSC. You have to email the NV company that handles Big Huge MSC's shops and then they have to email Big Huge MSC and then Big Huge MSC replies to them and then finally you get a reply from the NV company.
5. You are an employee and not an IC and they treat you that way. My last trip, on one of the aforementioned new home shops, I realized very quickly, before he saw me or knew someone was there, that the agent was with a customer. So I left. I had another shop nearby and decided I would go do it and come back after hoping he would be done. Normally the end MSC, who I've worked with before, would have thanked me for being smart. Instead of was chastised because I should have stayed there, texted the scheduler, and awaited further instruction. Which would have completely outed me as the shopper. Because EMPLOYEE.
6. Reports are a pain in the butt. So let's say you're doing a shop for Big Huge MSC. You have to lot into the NV company that handles their NV shops, get specific login information for Big Huge MSC, then go log into Big Huge MSC's site to do the report, come back to the NV site, fill in a quick survey there. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's annoying and probably adds 3-4 minutes of time per shop. Especially if both are sassie companies. Since you can't be logged in to 2 sassie sites at once you have to log in and out of both. And you can't save the NV passwords because it will overwrite your normal login. And there's no standard. 20 different MSC logins, 20 different usernames and passwords. 3-4 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but if you do 10 shops in a day you're spending an extra 30 minutes on BS.
7. You have limited competition between MSCs. So if you piss off one company 1/4 of your opportunities are gone. Likewise if you lived here and didn't travel you can't afford to piss one of them off. And they know that. At least with the MSCs I work for the most outside of NV it's a give and take and a balance of power. I do a lot of favors for MSCs because they take care of me and they take care of me because they know I do them some favors and they need route shoppers. There's a balance there. We both know we need each other and we both appreciate each other. In NV the balance of power is horribly unequal.
There are reasons that a body stays in motion
At the moment only demons come to mind