I had a friend who did it for a period of time, and there was nothing scammy about it. He mystery shopped, his tab was comped in most cases – though some of the mystery shops aren’t comped, such as gas stations, so you take those only if you need to buy gas anyway. There’s no real “mystery” to mystery shopping; corporations pay mystery shop companies to find people to mystery shop their establishments and report their findings for the purpose of essentially spying on them without being obvious about it. In this manner those corporations can find and fix the flaws in their operations, which is rather important to that company’s interests in continued operation.
Not that I’m saying there aren’t bad mystery shop companies out there who so weasely things, but the concept of mystery shopping itself is legit.
As for ideas to make some extra cash, home-based business I think are what you need to look into. I myself started a home-based PC Repair business a few years back when finances were threadbare and I really needed to do something. Since it is an area I was already well acquainted with it seemed the natural thing to do.
One other area in which you can investigate is selling things on eBay. Although it’s already crowded with sellers pitching eveything under the sun there’s always room for more, especially if you can find a nice little nice that sells well and doesn’t require much in the way of cash outlay. For a few months I actually sold a range of standard battery chargers for Black & Decker cordless tools. I was able to get them at a unit cost of less than $4, but they consistently sold for $20-30 online – a pretty handsome return, especially considering B&D themselves sold them retial for $15. For every $20 I spent on chargers, I was almost always guaranteed of netting $80 in the bargain. I just had to be careful how many I listed at a time (two of each voltage seemed the most I could do before selectivism among bidders dropped the mean high bid levels)
I mention this because I really didn’t think battery chargers would have sold, much less for the kind of prices they were selling for, so until I had discovered quite by accident that they were a hot item I hadn’t even considered it. What I would do is go into your local dollar store or thrift shop or whatever and see what sort of things you can get, then check online to see if there’s a market for it on eBay. If you can get it in quantity, especially cheap, you may find you’ve got a small pot of gold on your hands. (Don’t laugh at the dollar store thing – I’ve seen people go in and buy cheap branded stuff like Coca Cola glasses or Disney-branded merchandise and sell it for 3-4 times what they paid for it retail)
Perform a search for the item(s) you may be interested in selling, and select “Show completed auctions” from the left navigation panel. This will list all of the auctions that have ended over the past while. This will let you know how many have shown up on eBay recently and by how many different sellers (and thus how competitive the market for that item is), how many of the items sold and for how much and how many bidders there were on average for each item (thus letting you gauge demand and how competitive bidders will get over it.) You can also check out a few completed auctions just to get an idea of how the auctions were presented and the seller’s terms and conditions and sort of gauge how those terms and conditions may have effected the final value of the items. (Some sellers charge excessively high shipping rates or have handling fees, and these things will determine how high the average bidder is willing to go after factoring in these additional charges. Some sellers also have unreasonable terms and conditions, or have bad feedback, or have something about their auction listing that turns people off. This will effect how many potential bidders will actually place a bid.)
$20 a week should be simple, look for a very part time Fast Food job. In LA the wages start over $6.00 AFAIK so if you did 10 hours or less you should easily take home $20 to $40.
I think the Underpants Gnomes guild will be very upset by this. I know for a fact they are well connected.
Do you have a Dairy Queen or other sort of place nearby that decorates cakes? I have a friend who has a job as a graphic designer for an ad company, and for extra money she decorates cakes at the DQ 1 or 2 nights a week.
She gets commission on the cakes and I would imagine at least minimum wage, and from what she says the job is both easy and relaxing.
I wouldn’t recommend doing it every week, but you might consider selling your blood plasma. The amount you can sell depends on your weight, but I think I’ve heard about people making $40 or so doing that. A little squicky, perhaps, but that might be a way to supplement income.
Have you thought about mowing someone’s lawn each week? Once you find a customer – which you can probably do just within your own family or circle of acquaintances – you can easily earn $25 to $35 each week for about an hour’s work (or an hour-and-a-half if they want edging and trimmng). It’s simple work and regular, dependable income. I can advise you regarding equipment, techniques and so forth if you are interested; just email me at the address in my profile.
Yeah, the ebay thing can work. I know when my buddy had a yard sale, and put “No early birds, starts at 7am” in the ad, a couple still showed up at 6:30 with a box truck and bought a whole bunch of stuff. They probably hit three more sales and then went to the big Costa Mesa swap meet to sell. But you could use ebay, too.
If you are considering Mystery Shopping, I suggest reading this thread, particularly post #10, where I describe what I do.
If you want, you can e-mail me if you are in North America and are interested in checking it out. I can then send you the website name. I would gladly post the website name here, but I’m unsure if it’s against SDMB rules.
I currently make $9.46 CAD per hour and am reimbursed for mileage at 40 cents per kilometre. I do about two stores a week, which takes me approx. 3 hours total.
One of the newer business models out there is selling things on eBay for a commission. Most people have stuff they’d like to get rid of, but don’t have the time/inclination/whatever to list it themselves. So you do it for them, and you get a commission (say, 5%) on the sales price.
You might be able to work something on buying on eBay, although I don’t know of anyone trying that.
I can at least save you some time on this one. They’re generally not interested as most tattoo artists are just that, artists. A rather large percent of the time they don’t actually do the tattoos that are displayed as flash in the shop, they just use them as idea starting points for indecisive customers.
You could make $50 by participating in a focus group. I have one lined up next week. It will be two hours and they’ll have light refreshments. Fifty bucks in two hours for just give out your opinions. I’m all for that. They don’t even pay me that in class. Heck, they don’t even pay me that here!
If you have a car, look into the courier business; I deliver prescription medicines to various nursing homes at night. While I have a regular five nights per week route, the company I work for hires people who deliver only “stat” prescriptions; some of those people make a solid $250-300 per week for very little effort. You do have to be available on an “on-call” basis but that basis can be limited to nights only, weekends only, ect. Also, some of the labs that do blood work, urinalysis, etc, are often looking for people to pick up samples for delivery to a central location. You might have to pay for your own gasoline, but the mileage is deductable at tax time.
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