@Cme4prt wrote:
Thank you so much for sharing this. These are the kind of ideas that I’m looking to expand upon....
Expanding upon the previously mentioned ideas...
Working Whenever The Pay Is Highest
If you are open to working for Uber, Lfty, etc. you could just work for them when they have pay "surges". That is whenever there is a heightened demand for drivers, and a low supply.
If you are open to working for food delivery companies such as Door Dash, Grub Hub, Uber Eats, etc, you could just just work for them during peak paying hours. The peak paying hours for those type of companies tends to be right around lunch time, and dinner time.
If you want to do gas station mystery shops, you could just do them when you need gas, or it is at the end of the quarter, and the pay on them is at it's highest.
If you were to do all three of those things, you could probably make better pay on average than if you were to stick to just one type of work, and do it all the time.
State Inspector Work
Another idea many mystery gas station mystery shoppers may not be aware of is that of possibly becoming a state gas station inspector, especially as this year draws to a close. That is because unlike us, they are given a whole entire year to do as many stations as they want to do, and I believe their yearly cycle is about to draw to a close. Thereby possibly making it a good time to apply for that job for anyone interested in it.
What the state inspectors do is visit gas stations, typically once a year, to collect fuel samples from all of a station's pumps. They do this by driving around in a special truck designed to collect, and organize many different fuel samples. And the purpose of doing this would be to make sure there is nothing wrong with the gas. To make sure the pumps are pumping the correct amounts of gas, to make sure the gas is not bad as can sometimes happen with ethanol blended fuels, and to make sure that if people are paying for 98 octane gas, then they are actually getting 98 octane gas. They also do some other little things here and there too, like checking for leaks in the pipes, and credit card skimmers, but nothing that would appear to be too hard for the average person to do with just a little bit of training. If you ever look at gas pumps and see the a sticker that says something to the effect of "Weights & Measures", these are the people that put that sticker there to let the public know they have checked it.
It's not a bad gig if you're able to get it. I see the state inspectors out every now in then when I do my mystery shops, and the one I talked to, I believe he said he gets paid something like $50 per station, can sign up to do as many stations as he wants, and can do them over the course of a whole year, has zero competition, because each state inspector has "protected territories". Meaning someone that doesn't know any better can't sneak in there, and get the job done for $15 when he was planning on doing it for $50. And because of that, he can just take his time, doing the work whenever it is convenient for him. He said that while he chooses to stay local, someone could choose to travel doing this type of work, and do as many stations as they liked if they wanted to.
I found that to be interesting when it would seem so many of us would like to have higher paying work from the MSCs, but our competition often forces us to either accept lower pay, or risk missing out on work in hopes of being able to get higher pay. With this state inspection type of work, you don't have to worry about that because you get to enjoy "protected territory". And you don't have to wait until towards the end of a project cycle to possibly get that $50 either. It's money you can get from day 1 with zero competition. So I thought that was rather attractive. What I didn't like though was he said it typically takes him like an hour or so to do his inspections, where in contrast, with our mystery shops, it usually takes us a lot less time if we know what we are doing. But still I think it's an interesting gig for anyone that likes to do gas station mystery shop work.
Here is a link to a video about this type of work for anyone that might be interested in it:
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www.youtube.com]