There is a growing movement to boycott $5 shops. After all, to travel to the shop site, perform the shop, travel back home, and then complete the paperwork, you are talking about an hour and a half of your time, more or less. This equates to just a couple of dollars an hour for your time and effort. Is your time with more than that? Shoppers are fed up with the insult of being offered this amount of money, and are pulling together to demand more money on these shops. Given the cost of gas these days, that $5 may not even cover your own personal travel expenses to do the shop, much less pay you anything for your valuable time and effort.
How Does It Work? When a provider is unable to fill a shop in the required period of time, they are typically forced to increase the pay for that shop just to get the job done. Now whether you are holding out for the pay to be raised to $10, $15, or more is your discretion, but most shoppers have gotten to the point that they are no longer willing to lose money shopping.
Will It Work? Absolutely! The key to making it work, though, is for all mystery shoppers to band together. If there is a small band of shoppers still accepting the $5 shops, the schedulers will not get the message that these $5 shops are not acceptable any longer. To send a loud and clear message to providers and schedulers, shoppers need to pull together in a strong, united front and simply not accept the $5 shops until the pay is raised. And don’t worry, it will be raised! The providers need the shops completed, and they certainly have an extra $5-10 in their profit margin.
If there are just a handful of shoppers nationwide who do accept these $5 shops…. Well, first of all, I can’t imagine anyone would be willing to work for that insanely small amount of money. That fee doesn’t even meet the federal minimum wage! But in the event a shopper is located very close to the shop or has another shop very close to that shop and wants to combine them to make the most of a shopping outing, don’t worry even a shopper or two refuses to join the boycott movement. Providers will begin to see that even if people are accepting the $5 shops, they will be accepted at a much slower and sporadic pace, which will give providers time to pause and re-think their pay structure.
How Will This Turn Out? It will only take a scheduler to have difficulty with a handful of $5 shops for them to analyze their fee schedule and see the light. So as you stop accepting the $5 shops and hold out for the higher paying shops, you will gradually stop seeing the $5 shops over the course of the next few months.
While it may seem detrimental to your own paycheck to pass up on shops, if you sacrifice the $5 shops for the next few months, eventually you will see the benefit of higher paying shops. This means that you will soon be able to earn more money for the same amount of work. What’s more, you will be able to earn what your time is actually worth rather than working for peanuts.