There are pitfalls with that too, but 1-2 computer repairs probably netted what all those surveys did, in the end. And of course, it’s pretty easy to make more than $80 a day fixing computers, and with less overhead than scrapping.

Secret shopping was a lot of work — they wanted an unbelievable amount of detailed information. For example, they wanted to know how many seconds did it take from the time the drive-thru beeped to the time someone spoke to you. There were probably 10 different things that they wanted measured in seconds. I really don’t see how you could even do the shop without a phone or a stopwatch.

For the shop, she got her meal paid for plus about $10. What we ordered was also dictated, so sometimes she had to order items we didn’t want to eat.

The problem became that they were calling us somewhere between 10-15 times a week, and you had about 4 hours to respond. I suppose if you really, really liked eating from this particular chain it would have been a good deal. Also, the vast majority of the calls we got were during weekdays, so it didn’t work very well for someone who was already employed. For someone with a flexible schedule willing to eat at the same chain 10-15 times a week, it would have been a great deal.

I haven’t tried any of the schemes you mentioned in your post. All of them sound like more trouble than they’re worth. If I ever got hard up for money I would either copy edit people’s documents for money, or do a bit of computer repair work on the side. I would think one job doing either of those things would make you more money than all of those other jobs combined in a week.