I'm just curious.

What is the furthest you've ever traveled to do only 1 or 2 shops that weren't something like a resort shop or at least $100+? After you got home and did the report, did you think it was worth it?
For those who do routes: What is the longest route you've ever done? Do you ever think you're crazy for spending so much time on the road?

The longest I've traveled for a single shop was 35 miles (when I was still new to doing mystery shopping). At the time I thought it was worth it for the $25 pay. Looking back, I don't think I'd do it again. I don't do route shopping except mini routes of 3-4 shops. This is mostly because I don't like doing more than 5 or so shops per day.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2018 02:51PM by sassymmmm.

I do 2-4 10,000+ mile routes a year.

If the shop is NOT a resort/casino, or is less than $100, and I have nothing else out in that direction I will only go 20-30 miles RT. I really try to either have a reason to be in the area, or bundle a couple of easy shops.

When starting and loved to go into the city, traffic wasn't as hectic as it is today, I drove 35 miles one way to Beverly Hills for a breakfast job that paid well. I also did this for my cosmetics jobs, when they gave out samples of Chanel. Everything was fun at the beginning and I wanted to prove myself. No more, not worth the time or the hours sitting on the freeway....the fee's have not gone up, some have come down.

I did a single shop 60 miles away for $100. I could not find any other shops in that area. It was worth it, despite having to go over the Bay Bridge.

To put this in context, this was when I was shopping full time, and my shopping area was a 20 mile radius from home.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2018 05:49PM by HonnyBrown.

@bgriffin wrote:

I do 2-4 10,000+ mile routes a year.

I'm curious about this. Do you put together routes with tons of jobs for a period of a few weeks to a month? You get enough in fees from that to cover gas, car wear and tear, and hotel rooms on the trip?

It sounds like something I'd love to do since I've always enjoyed road trips, but based on the work I currently get just driving around town it would be hard to cover just the hotel room costs unless I was staying in a roach motel every night.

Funny you post this today because I probably just set my record today for mileage for just one shop... 50 miles one way, for $45 (a very healthy bonus). Arranged last minute as a bit of a favor for the MSC. Wasn't doing anything else today. Was worth it, because I was still home by 11am, and could still do everything I had planned, and now I will have $45 more then I would have had before.

(I'm also trying real hard to crack $2000 in a month for the first time ever. Now $3 short, will get it somewhere)!

Shop9, you could probably get a hotel shop for the overnighters and parking shops for the city. There are also gas station shops.

If you are signed up with a bunch of MSCs and a good planner, you could make your expenses close to zero.

.

@ShopGuy9 wrote:

@bgriffin wrote:

I do 2-4 10,000+ mile routes a year.

I'm curious about this. Do you put together routes with tons of jobs for a period of a few weeks to a month? You get enough in fees from that to cover gas, car wear and tear, and hotel rooms on the trip?

It sounds like something I'd love to do since I've always enjoyed road trips, but based on the work I currently get just driving around town it would be hard to cover just the hotel room costs unless I was staying in a roach motel every night.

On 12/31/2012, I completed a route of 437 miles consisting of 17 bank branches. I departed at approx. 05:30 AM, to arrive at my first stop, a drive of 186 miles, by 08:30 AM, and returned a tad past 08:00 PM. Had not all stops been within an approx. 100 mile area, I could not have completed the work, which was required, by the 06:00 closing time. All reports were due the next day, so my gross of $917 was actually for two days. The second day's work of that many reports was, by far, the more difficult of the two.

1,150 miles to buy a tube of lipstick.
2,300 round trip.
All expenses paid, airfare, hotel, per diem and shop fee.
That was the only shop. It took 15 minutes.

ETA- once flew RT LAX to MIA for an observation only shop.
4,500 round trip.
Same deal. It was my only shop.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2018 08:26PM by SoCalMama.

I took a bonused shop in Bangkok last week! I mean, I was in the general vicinity anyway, but it paid for that leg of my flights.

So...overall 15,599 miles traveled, but I only flew 430 miles off course from the resort shop I was doing (which I guess would disqualify the whole trip) to take that one shop.

Have you checked AirBnB? I’ve found very nice rooms at half or a third of what a cheap hotel would cost.

@ShopGuy9 wrote:

It sounds like something I'd love to do since I've always enjoyed road trips, but based on the work I currently get just driving around town it would be hard to cover just the hotel room costs unless I was staying in a roach motel every night.

WOW these answers are a lot further than I thought I'd get for an answer.

@ShopGuy9 wrote:

Do you put together routes with tons of jobs for a period of a few weeks to a month? You get enough in fees from that to cover gas, car wear and tear, and hotel rooms on the trip?

It sounds like something I'd love to do since I've always enjoyed road trips, but based on the work I currently get just driving around town it would be hard to cover just the hotel room costs unless I was staying in a roach motel every night.

For long routes like that 95% of the work will be the same shop. So let's say it's a gas station route. I might have 500 Exxon stations assigned to me. That's going to be most of the work. I might pick up a Five Guys or a Sonic for lunch or dinner and an occasional hotel shop if it's one I particularly like doing, but most of it will be those 500 Exxon stations.*

*no they're not gas station routes and I don't even do Exxon gas stations anyway this was just an example

If I didn't make enough to cover expenses then I wouldn't do the route.

To do long routes like that you probably would not be doing the same work you're getting driving around town.

@HonnyBrown wrote:

Shop9, you could probably get a hotel shop for the overnighters and parking shops for the city. There are also gas station shops.

If you are signed up with a bunch of MSCs and a good planner, you could make your expenses close to zero.

Actually I have found it's usually easier to outwork your expenses than it is to shop them. There are some exceptions to this. I love both the Market Force and Maritz shops that reimburse gas but they're both very hard to schedule into a long route because so much can go wrong. For MF you can pick them up on the fly sometimes but unless it's late in the quarter Maritz usually can't be scheduled for the same day in my experience. I also rarely do city center shops so parking isn't an issue. I did have 3 parking fees this month for a whopping total of $18. It would have taken much longer to find $18 in parking shops than it was worth, plus for most of them I would have had to stay longer than I did. For hotels, I generally allocate $100 per night. It is vey rare that I can't find something in this price range (considering I have all the travel codes from the huge company I used to work for). So even if I do a $200 a night hotel shop it is really only worth $100 for me. In the video world that's 2 extra retail shops or 1 extra new home shop. I'm SLOW on written reports so even say an ACL hotel shop will take me at least 2 or 3 hours. I can very easily make $100 in those 2 or 3 hours doing shops (even written shops fairly often). For meals, again, I rarely want to take time during the day for a lunch and at night I'd normally rather just grab a to go order from Panera and take it back to my hotel. Most food shops will take me an hour to do the shop and at least 30 minutes onsite. I can do 1 extra retail video shop that day and make more than the dinner shop I just did.

The longest I have done so far is a 500 mile route. It was the end of the quarter for those “snap 3 pictures in the dark” for a specific gas station brand. I left at 1pm and hit up a couple of daylight shops along the way to my first darkness stop. Returned home around 3am and spent an hour or so inputting reports.

I definitely could have (should have?) spent a little more time planning that trip, but it all worked out fine. I had been glancing over the “available shops” map, realized I could form a decent route, self assigned a pile of shops, and was in my car 10 minutes later.

@SoCalMama wrote:

1,150 miles to buy a tube of lipstick.
2,300 round trip.
All expenses paid, airfare, hotel, per diem and shop fee.
That was the only shop. It took 15 minutes.
.

They could've at least thrown in a matching blush!!!!!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2018 04:13AM by Lattegal.

I saw the subject line and knew you were going to get something like this, LOL.

@sassymmmm wrote:

WOW these answers are a lot further than I thought I'd get for an answer.

@Lattegal wrote:

@SoCalMama wrote:

1,150 miles to buy a tube of lipstick.
2,300 round trip.
All expenses paid, airfare, hotel, per diem and shop fee.
That was the only shop. It took 15 minutes.
.

They could've at least thrown in a matching blush!!!!!

I really like that lipstick too. Good stuff.
My daughter tried to use it once. It was like a scene from Mommy Dearest.

I've always had that one or two shops that I needed to make a perfect route where schedulers don't get back to me until after 24 hours which is too late when you are trying to self assign other shops to make a route. For that reason, in town routes have always been a challenge for me.

I'm on a short out of town route now...even with the travel to and back, I'm making more than 3-4 days doing shops in the city. Productivity is everything. Like bgriffin said, sometimes it's better to just get shops for the fee than for the reimbursement. I did an intown Airbnb because the 1.5 drive home and the 1 hour drive out the next morning didn't sound appealing to me. Also, I was pushing it to get in the last few shops. I pretty much came out even but the nice thing is that my reports were done well before 10pm and that includes have dinner first!

@SoCalMama wrote:

@Lattegal wrote:

@SoCalMama wrote:

1,150 miles to buy a tube of lipstick.
2,300 round trip.
All expenses paid, airfare, hotel, per diem and shop fee.
That was the only shop. It took 15 minutes.
.

They could've at least thrown in a matching blush!!!!!

I really like that lipstick too. Good stuff.
My daughter tried to use it once. It was like a scene from Mommy Dearest.

LOL! The visual! Ok....now inquiring minds want to know. Which lipstick? You don't need to name names. Was it from one of those special boutiques?

I live in a rural area, so long distance travels for a route is part of the work. I always try to combine the route with something else I want to do - therefore, a bonus.

For me, Spring and Fall are not as busy since its planting and harvesting time while Summer and Winter can be the busiest.

Recently after filing my tax return, I claimed app. 22,000 miles for my mileage deduction.

bgriff, thank you for that perspective! I had a gas station shop for ACL and wanted to do a Maritz shop at the same location. They were scheduling for May and June.

@bgriffin wrote:

@HonnyBrown wrote:

Shop9, you could probably get a hotel shop for the overnighters and parking shops for the city. There are also gas station shops.

If you are signed up with a bunch of MSCs and a good planner, you could make your expenses close to zero.

Actually I have found it's usually easier to outwork your expenses than it is to shop them. There are some exceptions to this. I love both the Market Force and Maritz shops that reimburse gas but they're both very hard to schedule into a long route because so much can go wrong. For MF you can pick them up on the fly sometimes but unless it's late in the quarter Maritz usually can't be scheduled for the same day in my experience. I also rarely do city center shops so parking isn't an issue. I did have 3 parking fees this month for a whopping total of $18. It would have taken much longer to find $18 in parking shops than it was worth, plus for most of them I would have had to stay longer than I did. For hotels, I generally allocate $100 per night. It is vey rare that I can't find something in this price range (considering I have all the travel codes from the huge company I used to work for). So even if I do a $200 a night hotel shop it is really only worth $100 for me. In the video world that's 2 extra retail shops or 1 extra new home shop. I'm SLOW on written reports so even say an ACL hotel shop will take me at least 2 or 3 hours. I can very easily make $100 in those 2 or 3 hours doing shops (even written shops fairly often). For meals, again, I rarely want to take time during the day for a lunch and at night I'd normally rather just grab a to go order from Panera and take it back to my hotel. Most food shops will take me an hour to do the shop and at least 30 minutes onsite. I can do 1 extra retail video shop that day and make more than the dinner shop I just did.

@Lattegal wrote:

@SoCalMama wrote:

@Lattegal wrote:

@SoCalMama wrote:

1,150 miles to buy a tube of lipstick.
2,300 round trip.
All expenses paid, airfare, hotel, per diem and shop fee.
That was the only shop. It took 15 minutes.
.

They could've at least thrown in a matching blush!!!!!

I really like that lipstick too. Good stuff.
My daughter tried to use it once. It was like a scene from Mommy Dearest.

LOL! The visual! Ok....now inquiring minds want to know. Which lipstick? You don't need to name names. Was it from one of those special boutiques?

I think that it normally costs about $40 a tube, but I got a 3 pack for $80.

I'm way over on the other side of the spectrum. I've done about 150 shops so far, most have been within 3 miles of my home or office, a couple of them were at most 10 miles away. About 15 of those shops were across the street from my home.

<<Recently after filing my tax return, I claimed app. 22,000 miles for my mileage deduction.>>

That's a lot of driving! My car is 4 years old and I have 15,000 miles on it total. City Life.

BarefootBliss, I too try to keep my traveling to a minimum. I'm lucky that there are a lot of shops available not too far from either home or my main job. If I expanded my MSC list I could probably get even more but I'm pretty happy with what I've got available to choose from.

I think my longest was around 2,800 miles over six days. That was only 12 shops. Another was 1,800, six days and 40 shops. There were lots of others, but most ranged from 1,200 to 1,600 miles.

Now that I have considered the question further, 2,800 miles is the farthest I have traveled



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2018 08:05PM by LisaSTL.

My longest route was NV-OK-MI and back, and it took a week. There were several casino shops and it paid well. All expenses, including food, airfare, and car rental were paid. Most of my long routes are less than 950 miles round trip and 2 days or less. Twenty to thirty miles is just a cross-town route in the city, and I do that every day. I bundle, but I would probably drive 20-30 miles across town for one shop if it paid at least $50.

I try to get my shops to at least come out at $0.50 per mile. Better than that usually but you never know how I feel that day. Some days all of the drugs I have to take just kicks my behind.