This is a mini-series on becoming a courthouse researcher that I started quite some time ago and through different random happenings, was not able to finish until now. If you haven’t heard of courthouse research before, or if you missed the first part of this series, make sure to start reading here. Otherwise, read on!
In this blog, I talked about how courthouse research is not a full-time job, except in rare cases. In this blog, I talked about it may still be worth your time to do it anyway. There are some ways to make each trip more profitable; one way (and the way that I did it) was mystery shopping.
Mystery shopping and courthouse research compliment each other in many ways. I often did mystery shops at Albertsons, a chain grocery store here in the West, and got paid $14 for the shop and $2 as a reimbursement for what I had to buy (I always had to make a small purchase when I did a mystery shop and then send that receipt in to the mystery shopping company.) This usually meant that I was buying lunch while at Albertsons–I would often buy chicken from the deli, and perhaps a small bag of grapes to go along with. Would I ever drive 20 or 40 minutes to go do a mystery shop for $14 and a free (very) cheap lunch? Umm, no! That is a waste of gas and time. I live in a fairly small town and so many of the mystery shops are not in my hometown but instead in one of the two larger cities nearby. As luck would have it, that was also where the courthouses were at (one in each city) and so I would go collect records at the courthouse in the morning, do a mystery shop at lunch and eat, then come back and finish collecting records that afternoon. It was a nice supplement to my real income, and I always considered the mystery shops to be my gas money–the shops paid for my gas and the items I had to buy were my lunch, which left the money I made as a researcher as pure profit.
The great part about this all is the flexibility. I had a certain amount of times I had to go to certain counties per month, just depending on how large those counties were. I simply went online to the mystery shopping companies and checked to see when they had openings in that city, and then planned my trips there around the mystery shops. As long as I kept up on my counties, Sunlark didn’t care when I went to a county. I could rearrange things as I needed to, which was really helpful.
I am no longer doing mystery shops or courthouse research, but if I were going to go back into one, I would probably go back into the other. They dovetail together very nicely.
Now that I’ve talked about the benefits of courthouse research, I wanted to talk about the companies themselves. Check out my next blog, where I start off with Wolfgang Research.