shopperpro

As the year starts off - well - I’m optimistic bordering on cranky. The cranky comes from fighting customer traffic in a local discount store this morning, but the end result is a shiny new camera. Since I don’t know too much about them, besides the fact that working with my old digital was a pain in the posterior region, and I cornered the first available sales associate that I could and explicitly explained my needs to him. I think he was a bit taken aback by my directness, but recovered well. He steered me away from the Nikon I was eyeing and pointed me in the direction of a nice little Casio that was on sale for under $100. He also told me that they can’t seem to sell any. Why? Because the darn thing is pink! No one wants a pink camera. Go know - I don’t care if it’s fuschia or puce as long as it works. I actually had to chuckle, I asked the sales associate if it was actually a good camera despite its pinkness and he responded by telling me if a member of his family wanted a camera with the specs that I provided him he would recommend the same one. So I’m poor again, but I have a working camera. I just had it outside taking some test shots since I have 5 photo assignments tomorrow and it shoots like a dream so far. Time will tell…

So far it looks like it’s going to be another busy month. I seem to have passed some form of threshold with my shopper rating for one of my companies as I am now seeing $100 assignments from them. Too bad they’re reimbursement only - these days I am leaning more towards fee only jobs. One of the assignments was even for a high end hair salon, but with the camera purchase I just couldn’t swing the output yet. Which reminds me - tomorrow, or soon at any rate, I’ll be covering understanding your mystery shopper payment, and I will probably be talking, er blogging, more about assignments types in the near future. I also promised a blog on phone shopping and Vocazilla didn’t I? A mystery shopper’s work is never done…;)

As it’s the end of the fiscal year as well I’m going to have to spend some time going through and sorting out my job information from the past year for my own personal taxes. Being an independant contractor has its perks - I get to deduct for the new printer, camera, and printer ink. The downside to this is that there are no taxes taken out upfront so I might just have to pay a bit extra this year.