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Friday, January 27

49 Shops and More

Starting tomorrow I'm working a route of 49 gas stations along with a few merchandising jobs and restaurant shops.  The 49 shops are all for the same brand.  I particularly like doing shops in volume because I can get a routine going and be super efficient at it.  Repetition saves me from re-reading shop guidelines, printing out reams of instructions, and mentally switching gears.  I just focus and get it done.

I also have four restaurants (again, the same chain), 5 menu audits (again, the same chain - making data entry much easier), and three merchandising jobs (you guessed it - the same job in 3 locations).  It's gotten harder for me to justify the fees some mystery shopping companies pay and one of the ways I mitigate that expense is by cutting out costs (printing one set of instructions for 49 shops is a lot cheaper than printing 49 sets of instructions) and time (learning the scenario once for 49 jobs is much less time consuming than learning 49 different scenarios).

Over the next 7 days I'll earn more than $600 in fees, about $330 in free gas, and various other reimbursements.  Not a bad way to end one month and start a new one.

3 comments:

  1. My mystery shopping company said to print the instructions for each shop because sometimes the scenario/tasks was different for each. I printed 50 pages for one shop! I was not a happy camper.

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  2. Linda - 50 pages! That's crazy. I try really hard to avoid printing like that. For example, with the 49 gas stations, I created a template in Excel so that I could take notes. Using both sides of the paper, I could record 14 shops on a single piece of paper. If I had printed the paperwork, it would have been 13 pages EACH.

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  3. Is there any chance of getting a copy of that template? Modified of course but just to get an idea of how you do that? I have some shops I do like that and it sounds like it would really cut my paper costs down drastically. Something I could also print on water proof paper as we do have quite a bit of precipitation here in the NW. Thanks for all the great ideas and inspiration.

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