I used to create car counting task "trails" where I'd make a list of 10-12 gas station car counting tasks to make a little extra cash on a Saturday or Sunday. I just came to realize that they can sometimes be throttled to where they do "over sampling" so they introduce a ton of them into a region and then once a certain number have been completed, usually a small amount, then they all go away.

This happened to me on Saturday the 11th where I had planned 12 in my region. That morning, I started to accept my tasks one by one for my route and then once I accepted the 9th one, literally all of the tasks in the entire region/state disappeared. I had initially thought it was because I could only accept a certain number and then I could add more once I finished those. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. In the almost 2 years I've been doing these car counting tasks, this throttling never happened until now.

I've experienced throttling before with other tasks (checking stores for Samsung Pay stickers in the window and asking some questions inside), and those disappeared without any notice after I completed like 15 of them, so I got to learn the hard way about this method of over-loading tasks. They too weren't mentioned as limited as well.

I wish they would announce this in the guidelines window in the Presto app even if its vague saying something like "once a certain number of tasks have been completed in a certain region, then the remaining tasks may no longer be available" or something like that. Thankfully I haven't seen this for any light audits.

Then again, since I've been doing this only for a few years, maybe I'm still young to this process and many of you here have experienced it already.

There are a few explanations for what you experienced. Are these insta or just regular orange? For the instas, sometimes it's a situation where there is a quota that must be reached and not all locations must be shopped and once that number is hit, they disappear for everyone. The pins might return if some of the locations that were originally claimed were not done in the time allotted. The pins don't return just for the locations that were not shopped in time or declined, all of them come back until the quota is met and it could be that the quota gets adjusted over time. For the instas, the MSC has to put money into an account to cover shops and if they did not deposit enough money then the pins disappear for everyone once the number of shops and projected payouts has been met. You might see this happen on a weekend and then the shops return during the week. I've had shops where I met a certain number and completed them all and could not claim any additional ones that day and then they were up the next day or a few days later, but there was no telling if they didn't deposit enough into the account.

I don't know if the MSCs have a way of depositing money into the account over the weekend.

Are these shops up today?

Yep, they're all InstaShops (Blue balloon pins) in Presto. The additional shops I wanted to do did reappear the next day and I chose just one to do which then made all the other shops disappear again. Really odd because these kinds of shops usually don't follow that pattern unless the dial was turned down for minimum requirements.

Usually, the car counting exercises just all sit there and you can do as many as you like in any given time and once the shop deadline appears, they go away and then reappear with an additional $5 to incentivize its completion.

I was aware of how the MSC needs to load $$ into the system to cover the shops. Now I can put two and two together and see that the money drives the appearance. Makes sense now. Thanks!