Starting tomorrow 1/1. Is this a new shop or has it been around before? Any tips/experiences?

I was curious, so I went poking around. I couldn't find any of these (even searching Houston), but I did find $3 calls to psychiatrists.

thegov2k2 knows. They mentioned it in another post/thread about Presto. None in my area. But I want some!

Car counting has been around for a few years. I do them when I can..easy $. The first ones of each session have more questions and photos than the ones that follow. They are a bit of a pain. There are different time slots and each needs a few visits, so there are lots of them. I prefer to wait until the first ones are completed so I don't need to get up close to the pumps to see what payment options there are and other things that can't be gathered from a distance. Otherwise, easy 15 minutes.

Not sure about reading gas pump meters..that hasn't been a part of the car counting in the past.

They must be for certain brands or a regional thing. I've never seen them but have read the posts. I'm jealous.

I don't know what the purpose of gathering the information would be, but they are not brand specific. They are done at a vast majority of random stations all over the place here. I can add a few hundred to my monthly goal when these pop up.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2024 04:43PM by MsJudi.

Did 5 car counters and 4 meter reads today. May or may not go on the 10-foot pole list, depending on how much crap i get from editors. The 4 meter reads were in my town and the 5 car counters were in another town 20 miles south. They seem to be only doing meter reads in my town and only the counters in the other town.

Anyway, the questionnaire doesn't account for the fact that some pumps have both diesel and regular gas. It asks you about customers at each as though all pumps are fully dedicated to either regular gas or to diesel. It asks how many customers were at regular pumps and how many were at diesel pumps. I didn't know what to do when a customer was at a pump with both, since it wasn't always possible to see exactly which nozzle they picked up. So in those cases I double-counted and explained in the comments. Sheesh.

Not to mention that at one station in a marginal part of town, a customer in a car parked in front of the little store saw me take a photo and came running over to confront me, asking why I was photographing him and yelling "There's serial killers out there! There's SERIAL KILLERS out there!" Somehow I was able to talk him down and finish the job, but yikes.

The meter readers had their own little surprise. The guidelines say that "all the pumps at the listed locations are believed to have meters" or something like that. Oh yeah? Of the 4 locations I did, I couldn't find anything resembling the meters in the example photos at any of them. So I took the required "proof" photos and put them in the report. Supposedly I'll get $10 instead of the listed $25 for a location with pump meters. The instructions also said I needed to immediately notify my "field coordinator" ... I guess that's the scheduler, who I don't know from Adam, so I emailed her.

Yeah, I think these are going to 10-foot-polesville.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2024 11:24PM by KokoBWare.

What I do when there are both diesel and regular gas on the same pump is try to see which hose they are using and/or make a judgement call based on the type of vehicle..ie large truck = diesel. Most of the time I count it as a regular gas customer. I never have many diesel counts..one or two. Also, a lot of stations in this area don't carry diesel.

Not every gas station here allows a panoramic view of the pumps, therefore it can be impossible to tell which hose is being used. I guess I can go by size of vehicle, but there are smaller vehicles that take diesel too, like some Mercedes.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2024 01:10AM by KokoBWare.

I used to do the pump meter reading at two specific gas stations and only places it was done, A year later I read on the news one of the gas stations was closed because they were cheating with their pumps. The second gas station was located at a busy corner but the meter reading in two of the more than 12 pumps was always about the same, month after month.

Didn't there used to be shops where the shopper also counted cars in hotel parking lots at a certain time of night? I seem to remember those.

@BarefootBliss wrote:

Didn't there used to be shops where the shopper also counted cars in hotel parking lots at a certain time of night? I seem to remember those.

I'm not sure about counting but I did do a bunch of projects where you go to hotels and see if anybody has commercial vehicles with commercial names and phone numbers on them and capture them.

Well, a new wrinkle on the meter readers. If the pumps don't have meters, you're supposed to take a frontal photo and a side-angle photo showing they're not there. The questionnaire provides room for just those two photos. So at the 4 locations with no meters, I took a frontal photo and a left-side photo and submitted.

Two were accepted. Two got bounced back to me. "Do you have any photos from the right side? Sometimes the meters are located there."

So nice to know the editors are on the same page.

I didn't, because the questionnaire only allows one side-angle photo so that's all I took. The gas stations were only a few miles from home so I went back today and shot the same pumps from the right side, showing no meters, and resubmitted. If they bust me for the right-side photos not being taken on the original shop date I'm going to be hella pissed, especially since 2 of the shops were accepted already.

10-foot-pole from now on, for sure.