I love small assignments, traveling between jobs, and cycle work. I just had an offer yesterday that I read with interest, at least the first paragraph. 26 gas stations, must take all locations, a small check out item to restock, and replace coupon pad monthly. ( 5 to 10 minutes) To be done the first 2 weeks of the month. Good so far. $400 per month as an I.C.- now it's not as attractive. ( I usually only do employee work) Then comes the 3rd paragraph, if the fixture is not in place you must install it ( allegedly 15 minutes.) Which will be sent to your home. 4th paragraph says you will make $20 to $30 per hour. Huh? This isn't in one large city and suburban area, so how is that right? It's $15.38 per store.
Then I take a look at the locations. They are in the state, but the closest one is 356 miles from me. The entire route would be well over 1,100 miles round trip. The entire far northern part of the state. ( I'm in the far southeastern part.)
Somehow they figured that it would be 700 miles round trip. I'm guessing that they plugged in the closest location, my home address, and then doubled it. They did not include the 30 to 50 miles between several of the stops. The top third of the state has several counties that have been declared disaster areas from the flooding that washed out several roads and bridges a few weeks ago. So I figure at least 2 or 3 nights of motel stays ( $200+), plus at least a few detours to find roads that are not washed out, and 2 to 3 tanks of gas.( $120+) This would have to be at least in the $1000 range to even think about it. Plus it is going into snow season, so that is an added bonus. As offered, it is a tremendous loss leader!
I can't help wondering why they wouldn't have reached out to someone in the UP, Northern WI. or MN. for this. Unless they have already been told to send it where the sun doesn't shine from everyone in that area.
Delete, delete, delete.

Just about every job on the MF purple portal

Boy, I thought of a bunch. One I had was where I had to buy soda and check and see if it was expired or not and send it into a company. The guy would never tell me how much he was going to pay me and finally I kept persisting and it ended up being about $30 for driving to the store and all these packages and the shipping. It ended up being about 2:50 an hour. ( there are about 15 additional steps as far as separating the soda and coding it and all kinds of things that I didn't even bother to mention. It was ridiculous. I don't know who this guy got to do it but it wasn't me!)

One other one was this big mapping project in Home Depot where we had to draw all these diagrams and say where every single SKU was and pictures and on and on and on for a whole department. Maybe if you were used to it it would have been fine but I got overwhelmed and bailed.

I can feel your pain! I hate the calls with nebulous assignment details, and even move evasive wage discussions! I got a call that a visit would be $40. The little detail was to find a large shipper at a Wholesale club and set it on an endcap. No authorization letter, just go in and TELL them that I was going to set up an endcap. Yeah, right. Even with prior authorization these places can be a nightmare. Then the additional little detail was mentioned in passing, I would have to service this endcap for 3 weeks for this fee. 4 weeks and a set up for $40. Each visit 51 miles round trip. Nope.

How can I know how bad it was if I didn't take it? Much, much easier to tell you the worst one(s) I accepted.

Hallmark's anything. Minimum wage and expect you to finish projects "somehow" that are un-finish-able because of the time it takes to complete the projects. I know because I ask the reps and all they do is complain about time constraints.

Driveline's 2 hour freezer sets, for a set pay instead of hourly, when I know it takes at least 3-4 hours to reset 16' of ice cream.

Anything Apollo, because they don't drug test and 80% of their employees smoke dope and cheat on their time sheets. Their drive allowance is .20 cents a mile and they want you to drive 1,000 for a one day job.

Anything Premium Retail now, because when you tell your Team Lead that your co-worker drank booze during their lunch break YOU somehow end up going home. Oh yea, that's because your Team Lead was at lunch with your drunk co-worker!

Anything SPAR, because they think paying you $10 an hour and no drive time or gas allowance (independent contractor-you pay all of your own taxes out of that ten bucks) and they want you to drive 45 minutes for a half hour assignment are GOOD payments. And when you say no, they cry like babies and sound exasperated and say they are going to have to take you off of the jobs you were assigned so they can give them to whoever they think will take the $5 gig.

Sounds about right for all of the above. They are all doing us a favor by letting us work for them. I never did Hallmark or Apollo as I learned from friends' bad experiences. Been there done that with all the rest. I could add Lawrence and CPM to the list.

OH, lest I forget Lawrence Merchandising, $10 an hour if you beg.

Funny thing is, they are hiring for the same position in the same territory that I applied for. This is the 4th time they've placed the ad this year. So, every 2 to 3 months they have to hire someone and I'm assuming that person flakes or can't/won't do the work and says they did. If they had hired me for $14 an hour I would still be working there and would have completed the assignments probably in half the time it takes their hire'ees or less. smh

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/2016 06:03PM by spicy1.

I wonder when these companies will realize that recruiting, hiring and training costs more per year than paying better wages and thus getting and keeping experienced people in the first place. Stores are becoming more vocal with their upper management about incorrectly done work. They are documenting and taking photos of the mishaps. So the next cycle, that particular MSC doesn't get that job again. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

@spicy1 wrote:

Anything Premium Retail now, because when you tell your Team Lead that your co-worker drank booze during their lunch break YOU somehow end up going home. Oh yea, that's because your Team Lead was at lunch with your drunk co-worker!

I worked for Premium Retail from 2005-2013 when health issues caused me to have to quit them. I guess I was fortunate, in that the teams I worked on had good Team Leads, and my Premium managers were good, decent people who understood the ins and outs of what we did in my area. Sorry you had a bad time with them...that sounds awful.

Thank you guysmom. I was really, truly looking forward to working with them. It's really too bad it went that way. I guess it can. I never expected it so I didn't do the "pretend like you didn't see that" as well as I do today in this business.