This has been the longest day ever. At $14.50, I freel like I made about $2 an hour. I was onsite for 2 hours and took over 100 pictures. The place was in horrible shape! And, they had a breaker go out so lots of lights were out. At home, uploading my gazillion pics and realizing they're not the right size, downloading a program to resize them, and then going through them a million times to get the pics for each question seriously stunk! And the website is so antiquated that you can only submit one pic at a time and then you have to click the camera link to add another. I had like 6 pics for each question because this place was so bad.

Never again. Sorry, I needed to vent.

Looks like you hit the worst gas station in the company. Little advice. One pic for each bad condition so if the bathroom was dirty take one picture of the worst dirty part. then submit that one. If the pumps are dirty hoses and rusty curb take a picture of one and submit that. This way you don't have to take 100's of photos. Next advice check report then submit and at the end it will allow you to upload all pictures on 1 page. Same for all Maritz shops. Most on site audits take 20 minutes tops. You just got an unlucky location.

I cringe when I pull up to a nasty station. It is too bad your first experience was with a bad one. Since you got a really hard one, the rest should be a breeze. The really nasty ones are not that common in my experience.

These shops are really not bad once you get in the rhythm. I only take one photo for each infraction, or if I take a bunch I only worry about one when I get home. I would invest in a cheap digital camera (or buy one used) that takes photos in the tiny size they need and don't submit your pictures in the report. After you click submit, it will tell you that you forgot your photos and you can upload them all at one. Most importantly, don't forget to submit your invoice along with a copy of both receipts or you won't get paid. Remembering to do this without prompting was hardest for me and I had to send a few desperate emails my first few shops.

By far the worst part is getting the pictures the right size. Once you figure out how to do that quickly it's not bad at all.

I highly recomment downloading a free program that'll do batch resizing--every photo at once. I use Irfanview, and you'll find recommendations for several others if you look around in the forum.

There is some really good advice here so I have nothing to add except this: You did yourself proud that you hung in there and completed the job. Not only that, after you thought you had to upload one photo at a time, you still did the right and submitted all the required photos and then some. That's the stuff good shoppers are made of.

Don't give up yet. You have already done the worst and now they will get better. I have been lucky with my audits as most have been in compliance with the occasional hand written sign. I will usually leave the station with about 20 piks. I am always in fear of having to do the nightmare audit that you stumbled upon and I know that it will happen eventually. It just happened to you on one of your first audits so it is now behind you. Maybe just try 1 more and see how it goes - good luck. You know that MSC's always have gas stations and cell phone shops.

Thanks so much to all of you who have responded. I really appreciate the tips and the encouragement. I have a question about the number of pictures. For instance, on the question, "All dispensers, including pin pad, clean, not faded, no missing or torn decals" every single dispenser had all of these issues. One dispenser even had broken chunks out of its facing. Do I take a picture for each condition, "clean, not faded, etc.?" Or just one picture for that question?

This place was so awful! They had a huge jagged and raw cutout in their drywall where they slid in an extra cooler. The tile floor was missing in areas, the ceilings were spotted and stained, the lights were filled with bugs and some were not working. The shelves were dirty...I could go on and on. And that was just in the store!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/24/2014 10:45PM by MelNel525.

It would have been very tempting to leave and cancel but you didn't! That just shows you can do any audit that they put in front of you now. Karma works both ways and I bet the next few stations will not have any no piks and you will be out in 20 minutes - maybe even with a bonus attached. One time I had to stop at an out of the way gas station on a trip. It was one of the brands that I shop frequently. All I could think about was how horrible this station was and how could anyone do an audit on it. There were flies everywhere, vomit all over the bathroom, everything in the store was filthy. That station would have been more than 100 piks - but luckily they are the exception and not the rule.

I am with you. When I had been MSing about 2 months I took a gas station just a few miles from my house for $10. It was the worst shopping experience I have ever had. It took me over four hours including time on site, report and pictures. The place was the nastiest thing I've ever seen. It was so windy and I was trying to flip through 30+ pages of the guide (that I had to print at home, cost me more than $10 just on that).

I have had offers to do others for as much as $75. I immediately delete them, it would take $200 to get me to do another one. NEVER AGAIN!!

Gas station audits are really one of my favorite types of shop. I easily remember my first. I was at the station for 1.5 hours, then it took more than an hour to do the report. These shops get much easier and faster with experience. Today they take around 15-20 minutes and I can get the entire report, with photos, done in under half an hour. These can also pay really well when bonused.

I was called with an offer to do several gas station audits today. I never did one based on the learning curve and the low pay. I was told it was a 32 page guide. I offered up that I didn't have an orange vest.

They asked me if I wanted to be removed from the list of gas station audits, and I waffled and asked that they leave me open to them, but I have more lucrative things on my plate right now.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2014 07:04AM by scanman1.

Back when I was VERY new to MSing I scheduled a gas station audit, but immediately cancelled it when I saw the long guid list of requirementse. Now that I have more experience I have one set up for next week. I drive by the location all the time; it looks very well-maintained from the outside, and I have my fingers crossed it's the same inside.

If it is a Maritz audit I just take one photo even if multiple pumps have issues, because there is only "room" to upload one on the form. I generally just take photos of all and look for the clearest photo or most obvious infraction to resize and upload. Since there are only maybe 10 possible infractions, on the audits I do plus pump photos and overall photos, I think the absolute may number of photos you would ever need is 38 or so, even if the station had 24 pumps.
For MarketForce audits you need to take photos each and every infraction of AND SUBMIT every photo you take. This could be HUNDREDS of photos. I have done one of these and would only do another if they were HIGHLY bonused.

One of my first gas station audits were 4 or 5 stations and I took picture after picture from one station to the next. So when I got home I had probably 70 or 80 photos and it took me hours to figure out which photos belonged to which station. I now know that I need a clear beginning and end to each set of photos. I have done several hundred gas stations since then and, as some of you have stated, can breeze through them in 20 minutes at the station and another 10 or 15 minutes for the report. Very important is a logical one-page worksheet. Gas stations are now one of my two favorites, especially when bonused.

When doing a route, if you make it a habit to take photos of the receipt(s) in the car before doing the rest of the audit, you will have an easy-to-recognize marker of where one shop ends and the next one starts on the contact sheet view. Another trick is to make sure the clock in your camera is set right. If you take pics off your camera and put them in folders on your desktop, you can select and move blocks of photos into folders by looking at the times. There is usually some travel time between shops, even if they are near each other, and there are a few minutes inside before you take your first photo. If the first in the block is the receipt, you can double-check that the right block was put into the correct folder.

My method is similar to Heartland's. The first picture I take is of me in the safety vest. Even though not all gas station audits require a vest, or the photo, that's how I delineate the next station. Another thing that helps me is that I take all the photos in the same order.

I"ve only done two but already I can see that the learning curve is worth it. The first one was rather difficult, and the station was a mess so that didn't help. But I'm getting more confident rather quickly, and like someone else said, there are always gas stations so it''s worth it to learn to do them. Maritz has some nicely bonused routes from time to time. I"m going out soon to do 7 more.

In our area, gas station audits from Maritz are never bonused, except if you are willing to drive up the mountains in the middle of the winter. Even then Maritz has had the same gas station audit in the mountains sitting there on the board for three months. It's gone from $5 to 7.50 to a $10 bonus.

They called me and asked me to do two gas stations that were a good 45 minutes away from me. I told them I would only do them if they gave me a $30 bonus per gas station. They haven't called me back. It's been over a week and the jobs are still sitting there. This was before I did my first gas station, or it would have been $100!

I have performed one gas station audit. It was a mystery shop reveal. It did not require many pictures. However, it had a sign board by the highway and the pumps, canopy and store faced backwards from the highway. It was close to where I lived. I had to return for the overall picture. Things got interesting when a neighbor pulled up to me and wanted to know what I was doing. Fortunately in lesser times I had performed surveillance and asked him back why did he want to know. Come to find out that there was a string of break ins including his house. We had a friendly chat, he was relieved and I never did tell him what I was up to.


Story done. For first timers, Ritter & Associates has lots of gas station audits. There are easy ones with fewer photographs and it is a non-reveal like my first one. Do a few of these. Then they have mystery shop with reveal for two others.

Maritz has the most complicated. I was surprised when I signed up. Fortunately I did not know that they send a packet as they had done so to my address. I called and said I was not at home so they took it off my account without a ding.

I've never had a problem telling people what I was doing. It's a revealed shop, after all, and onlookers get curious. "I'm a contractor, and am auditing the station for branding compliance." That was boring, wasn't it? I had someone walk up to me last summer and say, "That pump sure is a beaut…." and I told him I might open my gallery show soon.

Yes, good advice...and Maritz is the worst all the way around. But getting a resizer will be handy in the future. PhotoPad is a very good and simple one to use.

You can also just get a camera that lets you set the size you need in advance. Many inexpensive cameras have this feature.

Here is a bit of advice that may seem as if you were "cheating" (especially if you fear the shops with multiple infractions): Simply Google the address and review the street photo taken by Google Earth before accepting the shop. It's a good 'heads up" for what may be in store.

I've never done this for that reason, but have done it to better recognise the station and surrounding landmarks. Many instances, i've noticed that the GE photo was of another brand. For those, when arriving at the station, I've noted that the station is new pr very clean and refreshed or that the new owner or brand did little if anything to update. I have not come across any types in the middle.

There seems to be a lot of good advice here on gas stations in general and Maritz, in particular. Maritz is, without doubt, the MSC with the most gas station clients. In my area, there are seven different gas station clients and I know that other areas of the country have local chains that are also handled by Maritz.

Stations are generally shopped and/or audited between one and four times a year, usually every quarter. Audits conducted during regular periods generally pay between $10 and $15 per location with higher amounts possible at the end of shopping periods or if the shop is conducted at night.

Most audits require a certain minimum number of required photos per station plus photos for easily recognizable discrepancies. The client is looking for discrepancies that stand out--that the average customer might see or experience. Generally, it is not a white glove audit--nitpicking is generally disallowed. I try to find the two worst examples of each discrepancy and include those in my preliminary data gathering. At home, under better lighting, I can determine which of the two photos best shows the issue. I always try to get at least two photos of the overall site, the canopy and the convenience store because these photos can be cropped and/or enlarged for photos I may have forgotten to take during my visit.

Most debrief forms give you a place at the top of the form to add all of the required photos. Each question in the form that requires a photo will display a camera icon which can be clicked to add individual pictures. When you enter all of your data on the form and click SUBMIT, the system will verify that all of the required information is present and give you any data errors it encounters. If no data errors are encountered a review screen is displayed that shows all of your YES/NO answers and comments. Clicking SUBMIT on this screen will display prompts for the REQUIRED photos in the first section and the discrepancy photos in the second section. If you have more than one instance of the REQUIRED photos, leave one of your discrepancy photos (pick one that only has one photo) off the submission page. The system will repopulate the page showing the photos you have submitted and enable you to add additional copies/instances of the required and discrepancy photos. If during the photo submission, you discover that you answered a question wrong initially and either have a photo for a discrepancy not reported or don't have photo for a discrepancy you did report, you need to hit the <BACK> button on your browser, PAUSE for about 10 seconds and hit the <BACK> button a second time to bring up the review screen. At this point you can make changes to your audit, changing answers to conform to the photos you actually took. When you are doing many shops in a given day, it is easy to get the data between the different shops confused and mistakes do happen. Better to catch them here then to let them pass and have the editor flag the shop which you must eventually correct anyway.

Comment, about the 27-page audit forms: I have condensed forms available for most of the Maritz clients that make the work sheets manageable (at most one double-sided single page form). One of the clients sends a NCR form for each shop assigned, the back copy of which you must leave with the station. But I suspect that soon will go away and we will have to print our own forms to use at the stations. Just remember to expense the paper, ink and other printer supplies on your tax form. They used to supply the vests, too but cheap vests can be had for a few bucks at dollar stores or Big Lots.

tmlp gets the thoroughness award! That would be good to archive somewhere and point people to every time a Maritz procedures rant pops up.

MD - Re. setting the camera to the proper size... I prefer to take larger resolution photos and resize afterwards. That way if I have to crop a photo to get a detail that I missed (e.g. missing pump topper that I can crop from a full pump photo), the resolution of the cropped image will still be sufficient. I ran 150+ 3 meg photos through PixResizer yesterday, and in less than four seconds they were all uniformly at Maritz's requested resolution.

Eek that's less than minimum wage

heartlandcanuck Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've never had a problem telling people what I was
> doing. It's a revealed shop, after all, and
> onlookers get curious. "I'm a contractor, and am
> auditing the station for branding compliance."
> That was boring, wasn't it? I had someone walk up
> to me last summer and say, "That pump sure is a
> beaut…." and I told him I might open my gallery
> show soon.

I had a guy ask me what I was doing. I smiled and told him it was a hobby of mine and that is how I always spend my Sundays