Merchandising, Couponing, and Mystery Shopping

Most of the things I have been doing lately are outside the house, haven't been paid yet, though, in a few weeks. I did some Mystery shops last month for McDonald's, they reimburse you your food purchase and give you anywhere from $7.50 - $10 for doing the shop, they are fun, I did a bunch of them. I did a few cellular shops, they pay $9 - $10 each, no purchase necessary. I am now looking into a few websites that I found for more mystery shopping jobs, jobslinger.com is one. They seem to list merchandising jobs and mystery shopping jobs for free. I got in on a banking one for next week that pays around $15, no purchase necessary. The problem is that you just do not get paid for what you do for a month to month and a half.

I have done two merchandising jobs so far, 1 last week, huge one, and 1 the week before. I go this week to Waynesburg, get paid for driving though, since it is 1.5 hours away, to do a McCormick spices reset. These pay $10 an hour. They pay every two weeks so I will get paid in a few weeks for the two I have done so far. The first one I did was nice and easy, Starbuck's coffee. I went and rotated stock, made sure nothing was out of date, turned anything out of date into the manager, and then wrote down on my form what I turned in and what was now out of stock. I did this at two stores. Nice and easy, $10 at each stop and it did not take me quite as long. One store did, but it was packed with product that is why. The second job I did, HORrible!!@! I was to meet another person at KMart and we were to reset the whole pet food aisle except litter and non food items. The other person did not show up. This was my first reset, so I did not know exactly what I was doing, I did resets at Staples back in 1999!! So, the first hour I gathered my thoughts, got the planogram and labels from the manager and looked for the products that were discontinued. After an hour I realized the other person was not going to show up. So I call my manager, no answer, what to do? This was a 13 hour job for one person, two of us were supposed to be done in 6.5 hours. So I called my DH(dear husband) Who had just gotten 1 hour of sleep after getting home from working all night. Mom was babysitting, so he walked to moms house, mom drove him to help me. I started at 8am and got done at 7:30pm, only to find I had put the labels on wrong, so dead tired, only having a 15 minute break and sharing a granola bar for lunch, we fixed the labels and were home at 8:10pm. Not a fun day. So being crazy, I signed up for the McCormick reset this week being assured that people will be there this time. I hope so.

So I am expecting $20 soon from Project Payday, I'm trying to get a little bit of that done, but Riley keeps me busy and these last two weeks were crazy sales at Kroger and I was able to get a ton of stuff free and very cheap, like I MADE $20 to use on my other groceries AND got 60 crescent rolls 4 packs for free!! insane, I know. I just got back from two kroger trips and got a TON of stuff for $14.00. that is on my other blog, though, link at top left of this page. so those things take a lot of time and planning so I have not been able to do too much online work. oh well, at least I am trying.