The point I was trying to make in this thread a few days ago was that there was no way they were going to be able to get the shops filled at $30. Now the remaining shops are well over $30, and that is on the job board. Some shoppers are getting email offers that are higher than that. They just weren't willing to pay that much last week when I was in the area. So yes, it is true, there are dozens of locations that are not getting picked up at $30. My $50 to $75 offer last week probably wouldn't look so bad to them today. But I'm just not in that area anymore.

Remember that the downside of finding someone 'local" to complete a remote location is that once that shopper REVEALS himself/herself, Kern, Ipsos, etc must find another "local" shopper, because the shopper is outed. there is no anonymity in a small town! That's the fallacy in saying that local recruitment is the goal.

They are now $70+ and that's on the job board.

My bonused shops were cancelled and now there are only base rates on the board for 100 miles.

Weird. I’m seeing some for $100 on the board: $12.50 + $87.50 bonus.

@thunderdeacon wrote:

My $50 to $75 offer last week probably wouldn't look so bad to them today. But I'm just not in that area anymore.

Curious to know how many of those locations you offered to do for $50 - $75 last week got done for the $30.

Based on what I saw on the board, I would guess that half of them did and half of them are still available. I'm not sure if they got done at 30 or got done somewhere between 30 and 100.

They shouldn't be able to do that.

@loydrock wrote:

My bonused shops were cancelled and now there are only base rates on the board for 100 miles.

@Lorri Kern KSS wrote:

@thunderdeacon wrote:

There are 3 major gas station brands in my general area that are evaluated by Ipsos on a quarterly basis. This means that the end of March is a theoretical deadline for all three of them. One of them has been scheduled by Ipsos schedulers all along, one was with Kern and recently handed back to Ipsos, and one remains with Kern.

I have been given reasonable amounts of money to do very remote routes for the two projects that are with Ipsos. I asked for the same reasonable amounts for the same locations for the project that is still with Kern, and my request was denied. I am literally driving right by the kern-controlled locations as I am doing my route. If they would even give $50 for some I might consider it. But they won't. Certainly, it is their prerogative to say no, and it is my prerogative to pass them by. That said, we now have about a week left to get them done. How do they expect to get these locations shopped without going over the $30 amount? I just don't think it is possible. There are still so many locations on the board, and some of them are not even in remote locations. There are cities with multiple locations that are still sitting on the board at $30 a pop.

Remote routes take planning and take time. If kern doesn't start offering the amount of money required, they are going to run out of time. Especially since they are missing the boat with shoppers like me that could have helped them out if they had been reasonable. This project is also suffering from the move from the Maritz platform to Sassie, and they are taking more time to complete. Shoppers like me are also keener to continue to help out the schedulers that have been reasonable with them leading up to the end of the month as well. I explained this to Kern earlier in the quarter, and all I got back for my honesty was a nasty email telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about. Not surprisingly, that account was taken away from Kern and is currently paying reasonable amounts to get sites done. Now the last gas account they had is about to implode.

In all honesty, we are down to less than 1% open on the quarterly shops and 4% open on the monthly shops and still have 9 days left.

We have recruited more than 1050 shoppers into the IPSOS database and they are doing these shops for reasonable fees (reasonable meaning $15-$20).

We will get them done. You don't have to worry about that. We have been doing this for 23 years. We know how to cold call and recruit and that is what we are doing. We are given a budget by IPSOS. Believe me, if I had $50K sitting around, I'd give it to you guys, but I don't. I have what they tell me I have.

Please don't shoot the messenger. We are doing what we are paid to do, and that is to bring in the projects on time and within the budget that they give us. Blaming KSS is silly.

I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but the KSS schedulers have been amazing the last few months with my husband's routes - granted, he has done several hundred shops (various types of stations), but I was in the hospital for a week, and they worked with him to get shops rescheduled so that he could get them done, and when he's making routes for upcoming weeks, they are always willing to help schedule the shops to get the routes done! I know he's been dealing with Leah and Leslie, and they've been great! He is happy to work with them as much as possible! Hopefully everyone else is having similar experiences!

I am also not having a good experience with Kern. I didn't in CA either, I quit scheduling through them back then, and now most of my income has been taken from me because Kern won't even respond me.

And my son went across country doing gas station shops, and had to reschedule a few and turn around before he got to the end of the route, now he can't get any shops assigned to him either. And it is the ONLY time he has ever dealt with Kern.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/18/2021 01:29AM by Morledzep.

Wow...definitely different experiences. We've not had one "rude" or "snotty" exchange with a scheduler....and even though we've had some health crises to work through, we got the jobs done, and continue to get as many shops as we can handle!

@Morledzep wrote:

I am also not having a good experience with Kern. I didn't in CA either, I quit scheduling through them back then, and now most of my income has been taken from me because Kern won't even respond me.

And my son went across country doing gas station shops, and had to reschedule a few and turn around before he got to the end of the route, now he can't get any shops assigned to him either. And it is the ONLY time he has ever dealt with Kern.

I think that what you are saying is that your son had a route assigned and had to reschedule a few locations. That's fine. The part about "turn around before he got to the end of the route," means that he took a route and didn't complete it. That is basically failing or flaking. So, if that is correct, he would not get scheduled for any more work.

Mousegal, sorry, I removed those remarks because it was unkind.

I understand...emotions can be heightened when we're dealing with our livelihood

@SoCalMama wrote:

I think that what you are saying is that your son had a route assigned and had to reschedule a few locations. That's fine. The part about "turn around before he got to the end of the route," means that he took a route and didn't complete it. That is basically failing or flaking. So, if that is correct, he would not get scheduled for any more work.

What happened is that my son's girlfriend died, he went from AL to CA to try to get some of their shared property back from her brother (he couldn't get to the memorial service because of other obligations here). But when he got to AZ he found out that the brother had actually sold the items between the time my son left here and when he got to AZ. My son rescheduled the ones he missed because of timing and daylight hours to do on his way back and he completed them. But he asked for the shops in CA to be removed and told the scheduler the situation. He did all of the shops between here and AZ, with some scheduling changes. And he made a big detour on the way back and picked up a few shops that he hadn't scheduled before he left too. But now when he applies for shops through Kern he doesn't get them.

I believe that he should have continued to CA anyway, but I also understand that it might have been kind of raw for him to go there, especially after he hadn't been able to make it to her memorial service. And if the scheduler had said anything other than he understood, my son probably would have continued.

And for the record, it was a route that we made, each shop was applied for and assigned separately.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/18/2021 01:51AM by Morledzep.

@Morledzep wrote:

What happened is that my son's girlfriend died.

I'm sorry, my condolences. Shopping isn't really going to take precedence over that.

@SoCalMama wrote:

I'm sorry, my condolences. Shopping isn't really going to take precedence over that.

We made the route for going there so that we could afford for him to make the trip (I had just spent most of our reserves on a new car that he was driving while he left me here with his POS with a flat tire and a check engine light). We probably could have afforded it, but it's always better if we can make the long trips pay for themselves.

It was my son's ONLY interaction with KSS, He is was not signed up on their Sassie platform, he was doing the shops directly on the old MaritzCX platform (which was not being maintained and was tossing him out of the forms several times during each shop) because they had already disabled the simple to use and very reliable mobile app that Maritz had.

It does seem that Ipsos is making doing the gas station shops more and more difficult, and they are offering less and less money for them. They could easily put them on Shopmetrics and make it so the shops can be done through MobiAudit. And lying about the Sassie platform being "mobile friendly" to entice folks that don't know any better into doing them doesn't help anyone at all. I have a LARGE smart phone, I always buy larger phones so that I can see them well enough to work with them. But no matter what I do I can't do the Sassie shops on my phone, I can only take my laptop with me, transfer the pictures to my laptop and do the shops at the location before I move on.

I thought about buying 10" tablet so I can take the pictures and do everything on one device, but then Covid hit and things got weird. So I just fixed the laptop and kept using it. I did a bunch of gas station shops for another company a few weeks ago on MobiAudit.. 14 in one day. I could never do that with the gas station shops for Ipsos, 5 or 6 is my limit with the Sassie platform, and on the old MaritizCX mobile app I could usually do 10 - 12 if everything went smoothly. Nothing goes that smoothly anymore, and I can't seem to do the self-assign on Ipsos, and KSS won't assign them to me or to my son. So I guess I'm going to have to find another way to make money very soon. It'll only be for a few more years, I think I qualify for my full retirement at 62, and SS at 65, I just turned 60.

For the gas stations on SASSIE. I input everything except the two receipts and any photos (usually zero) on my desktop. Then, I save it. I go to my phone and open the report. Then, I shoot the photos of the receipts directly into the report and hit submit. As long as you can get to a desktop within the allotted timeframe, it's a really fast way to do it.

@SoCalMama wrote:

For the gas stations on SASSIE. I input everything except the two receipts and any photos (usually zero) on my desktop. Then, I save it. I go to my phone and open the report. Then, I shoot the photos of the receipts directly into the report and hit submit. As long as you can get to a desktop within the allotted timeframe, it's a really fast way to do it.

On the old MaritzCX platform I was managing to just barely get the shops done and debriefed in under an hour with my phone and my laptop. We learned to answer all of the questions and save the shop FIRST. Then use the laptop to upload all of the pictures, it still took a couple tries but it didn't kick us out as often and we stopped having to completely restart the shop from the beginning multiple times. And then they switched to Sassie, and it all went into the toity.. I tried doing one shop way down South, I got all of the pictures, and I got the shop 3/4 completed ONE time, and less than half way completed 3 or 4 other times. I gave up and drove home in the hopes that it was working here, it wasn't. In the end I had spent over 12 hours just trying in input ONE shop and never got it completed. There was some kind of internet glitch, neither of our hotspots worked, not in Southern Alabama and it was worse here at home in Northern Alabama. The phone company tech support was already closed and wouldn't open again until Monday. So I gave up. I haven't been able to successfully do a shop on the Ipsos Sassie platform yet, and I'm prepared to believe that it'll never happen.

I've done other Shopmetrics shops, and other MSC Sassie platform shops with no problem, on my laptop with my phone, in my car. But it never works right with Ipsos.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/19/2021 04:20AM by Morledzep.

@Morledzep wrote:

@SoCalMama wrote:

For the gas stations on SASSIE. I input everything except the two receipts and any photos (usually zero) on my desktop. Then, I save it. I go to my phone and open the report. Then, I shoot the photos of the receipts directly into the report and hit submit. As long as you can get to a desktop within the allotted timeframe, it's a really fast way to do it.

On the old MaritzCX platform I was managing to just barely get the shops done and debriefed in under an hour with my phone and my laptop. We learned to answer all of the questions and save the shop FIRST. Then use the laptop to upload all of the pictures, it still took a couple tries but it didn't kick us out as often and we stopped having to completely restart the shop from the beginning multiple times. And then they switched to Sassie, and it all went into the toity.. I tried doing one shop way down South, I got all of the pictures, and I got the shop 3/4 completed ONE time, and less than half way completed 3 or 4 other times. I gave up and drove home in the hopes that it was working here, it wasn't. In the end I had spent over 12 hours just trying in input ONE shop and never got it completed. There was some kind of internet glitch, neither of our hotspots worked, not in Southern Alabama and it was worse here at home in Northern Alabama. The phone company tech support was already closed and wouldn't open again until Monday. So I gave up. I haven't been able to successfully do a shop on the Ipsos Sassie platform yet, and I'm prepared to believe that it'll never happen.

I've done other Shopmetrics shops, and other MSC Sassie platform shops with no problem, on my laptop with my phone, in my car. But it never works right with Ipsos.

You must be doing the audits? I am doing the mystery shops. I can upload the mystery shop with photos in under 5 minutes. I did 3 tonight.

Come on, SoCalMama, do a webinar for us! How do you do that?? It takes me at least 30 minutes per shop to either do it on my phone - peering at the little photos to see pump numbers - or going home and uploading all the photos from my phone to the laptop/

@pambam57 wrote:

Come on, SoCalMama, do a webinar for us! How do you do that?? It takes me at least 30 minutes per shop to either do it on my phone - peering at the little photos to see pump numbers - or going home and uploading all the photos from my phone to the laptop/

As mentioned above, I am doing the mystery shops, not the audits. If everything looks good, only two receipts are uploaded,

@Morledzep wrote:

I believe that he should have continued to CA anyway, but I also understand that it might have been kind of raw for him to go there, especially after he hadn't been able to make it to her memorial service. And if the scheduler had said anything other than he understood, my son probably would have continued.

And for the record, it was a route that we made, each shop was applied for and assigned separately.

Hi,

Please PM me your son's name s I can investigate this and see what happened. We never disallow shoppers for having a death in the family, so I'd like t look into this.