I have a day off from work next week, and I want to try a route of shopping.

Do any of the experienced shoppers have advice for planning a route?

I am brand new but I do know mapquest works well. You put in all your stops and they will plan the best route for you.

For a fairly new shopper I would encourage having no more than 1 shop on your route that you have never performed before. Be prepared to give it plenty of time because if you have not done it before you really don't know how long it will take.

Now see what you can find that can be done on that day and self assign or request them. Plotting your route is actually a fairly minor part of the whole process. You need to check times to make sure you are set up to arrive at the right place comfortably within the window allowed for the shop.

So your first step in planning a route should be looking at those companies with whom you have already worked and seeing if you can line up shops you have done already in areas that will sort of flow together. When I am doing a route I generally am going in a particular direction. In the past few days I picked up a large number of shops that broke very nicely into one trip mostly east of me and then a large circle that started NW, moved W, moved S, moved E, moved NE and finally back home. I was able to incorporate locations that were 30+ miles from me because they were 5 miles or so from the previous stop. And I knew that I would be exhausted before I finished the circle route so planned a couple of possible break points to come home where rejoining the circle the next day would be easy without driving miles and miles out of my way.

And the real trick to routes is to make good notes as you go and drink plenty of fluids, especially in hot weather. We are still in the 80s here, so about the third stop on any route for me is to pull into one of the gas stations that offers any size drink for 69 cents. I get the largest drink possible and make it mostly ice. I will consume the soda fairly quickly and then can start pouring my bottles of tap water onto the ice to continue having cold fluid. I am not a big snacker, but without plenty of fluid I will wilt long before the job is done.

The better you know your area, the easier it will be for you to figure out a route of local shops. Anticipating when rush hour will be and either taking side streets or going against the flow of rush hour traffic can save you lots of time. Certain corners have lots of fast food and other eateries. These areas are usually mobbed at lunch hour, so I try to work around them and land there well before or well after lunch. All else being equal (which it rarely is), I try to do right hand turns as much as possible. Not only is it safer than crossing traffic, we also can turn right on red after stopping at most intersections here.

Just two things to add to Flash's great advice. I try to start my day with the shop location that is farthest from home and then work my way home. (unless I am doing a big circle). With the working-my-way-back-home strategy, if something goes wrong and/or you get tired or discouraged for some reason, you have two good options. The first is to use the fact that you will soon be home to help motivate you to continue after you take a short break for hydration or just to calm down. The other is that, if you decide that you need to interrupt the route and finish it tomorrow, the remaining locations will be those closest to your home. This strategy is the best that I have found for mitigating the effects of Murphy's Law on routes.

Also, keep your first couple of route down to a few shops as a confidence building measure.

Enjoy! Good route planning and execution can really catapult your MS experience, and income, to a higher level.

Thanks Hunnib! I use a GPS, with my BlackBerry GPS as a backup. I put in the addresses the day before. I use MaoQuest to determine distances, but not for directions.

@Hunnibee wrote:

I am brand new but I do know mapquest works well. You put in all your stops and they will plan the best route for you.

WOW! Great information as always, Flash, thank you!

@Flash wrote:

For a fairly new shopper I would encourage having no more than 1 shop on your route that you have never performed before. Be prepared to give it plenty of time because if you have not done it before you really don't know how long it will take.

Now see what you can find that can be done on that day and self assign or request them. Plotting your route is actually a fairly minor part of the whole process. You need to check times to make sure you are set up to arrive at the right place comfortably within the window allowed for the shop.

So your first step in planning a route should be looking at those companies with whom you have already worked and seeing if you can line up shops you have done already in areas that will sort of flow together. When I am doing a route I generally am going in a particular direction. In the past few days I picked up a large number of shops that broke very nicely into one trip mostly east of me and then a large circle that started NW, moved W, moved S, moved E, moved NE and finally back home. I was able to incorporate locations that were 30+ miles from me because they were 5 miles or so from the previous stop. And I knew that I would be exhausted before I finished the circle route so planned a couple of possible break points to come home where rejoining the circle the next day would be easy without driving miles and miles out of my way.

And the real trick to routes is to make good notes as you go and drink plenty of fluids, especially in hot weather. We are still in the 80s here, so about the third stop on any route for me is to pull into one of the gas stations that offers any size drink for 69 cents. I get the largest drink possible and make it mostly ice. I will consume the soda fairly quickly and then can start pouring my bottles of tap water onto the ice to continue having cold fluid. I am not a big snacker, but without plenty of fluid I will wilt long before the job is done.

The better you know your area, the easier it will be for you to figure out a route of local shops. Anticipating when rush hour will be and either taking side streets or going against the flow of rush hour traffic can save you lots of time. Certain corners have lots of fast food and other eateries. These areas are usually mobbed at lunch hour, so I try to work around them and land there well before or well after lunch. All else being equal (which it rarely is), I try to do right hand turns as much as possible. Not only is it safer than crossing traffic, we also can turn right on red after stopping at most intersections here.

Excellent advice Maven!

I'm thinking of trying some northern VA shops and working my way back to PG County. That's the plan for now. The apartment shop will be new, but the business inspections I will be familiar with.

@walesmaven wrote:

Just two things to add to Flash's great advice. I try to start my day with the shop location that is farthest from home and then work my way home. (unless I am doing a big circle). With the working-my-way-back-home strategy, if something goes wrong and/or you get tired or discouraged for some reason, you have two good options. The first is to use the fact that you will soon be home to help motivate you to continue after you take a short break for hydration or just to calm down. The other is that, if you decide that you need to interrupt the route and finish it tomorrow, the remaining locations will be those closest to your home. This strategy is the best that I have found for mitigating the effects of Murphy's Law on routes.

Also, keep your first couple of route down to a few shops as a confidence building measure.

Enjoy! Good route planning and execution can really catapult your MS experience, and income, to a higher level.

I've had apartment shops take 15 minutes up to one and a half hours. Your goal should be about 30 minutes. Obviously cutting off a target is never an option because they need to be given a chance to ask for the sale. There are two things you can do to keep the visit reasonable.

1. Pick whatever apartment they have available or will have available in your time frame and fall in love with that floor plan. Otherwise you may have an agent dragging you to every floor plan they offer. Your goal is to tour just one apartment.

2. Some agents will like to chat you up in order to build rapport, others don't know when to stop. Gently get them back on point. Since I always apartment shop as a single person with no children or pets that knocks out two subjects. If sales people try to delve too much into my job I tell them it is quite boring and I find the apartment a much more interesting subject