We are currently member of the National Consumer Panel- basically, we are a Neilsen family for what we buy. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, and it’s going alright.

It’s a bit more work than I thought it would be. Scanning everything we buy isn’t that big a deal. Scanners are fun, after all. But if I shop somewhere other than a traditional grocery store, I have to enter the price I pay for everything. Since we do most of our shopping at CostCo, this is a bit of a pain and also caused some conundrums for me.

You see, if I shop at Safeway and buy 2 gallons of milk, I scan one gallon of milk. I tell the scanner I bought 2 gallons of milk, and then I enter the price that I paid per gallon. But at CostCo, when I buy two gallons of milk, I am not charged per gallon. Still there isn’t a bar code for 2 gallons, there is only the bar code on each individual gallon. So, I scan the bar code. I tell the scanner I bought 2, and then I enter the price for both gallons- because that’s the price on my receipt, and if it ends in an odd number (and all prices end in 9) I can’t divide it evenly in two.

For some things, the big package has a singe bar code I can scan and that’s easy, but milk, the pasta we buy, etc- I just don’t know if I’m somehow skewing the results. Oh well, I have to tell them I was shopping at CostCo first, so maybe their computers figure it out.

Still, even after major shopping trips, the scanning and putting in information takes 5-10 minutes max, and I often do it while we’re putting stuff away.

 

I think we might be supposed to be entering more stuff than we are. It comes with a pre-printed card with bar codes for things like fruits and veggies or deli products. It includes a bar code for gas. I have yet to scan the gas bar code. Partly this is because me mostly don’t use gas- we use B99 biodiesel, but honestly, it’s more because we never get a receipt from the pump, so I have no idea how much we spent on gas until a couple days later when the charge hits the bank account.

I also sometimes don’t get purchases entered when J does some quickie shopping on his way home from work. He often leaves the receipt in his truck, or I don’t even know he’s been to the store until I see something new in the fridge or cupboards.

Still, I don’t think they can expect me to be perfect.

 

My biggest issue so far is with transmitting the data. You see, the scanner plugs directly into our cable modem and auto transmits at preset days and times. The times are almost always 11pm or later (sometimes like 3am). I am certain this is because it’s when they expect the “lines” to be the least busy. The problem with this is that the scanner beeps multiple times during a transmission. And our cable modem (and therefore the scanner) is in our bedroom. The way our house is wired, there isn’t another option.

So once a week or so, we get woken up in the middle of the night by this thing beeping. It’s annoying and we’ll take it off it’s base and shove it in a drawer so we can go back to sleep. But of course that means the transmission failed.

No problem, I thought at first, because there’s an option to manually transmit. I figured I’d just manually transmit each time after entering purchases. And leave the scanner off the base at night. Sadly, this doesn’t really work. I don’t know why. I have a cable modem, there, in fact, shouldn’t be any time of day that is significantly different in terms of capacity that any other time of day. Why my scanner claims it is unable to transmit, I have no idea. This means that I do end up leaving the thing on the transmitter. So at 11pm on a Monday night, when it starts to beep, I tell C- if you’re going to be up a bit, just leave it be. I’ll try to ignore it and fall asleep anyway. And at 2am on Monday night/Tuesday morning, when it starts beeping again and wakes me up, I listen to see if C is snoring through it. If he is, I leave it be and do my best to fall back asleep. If I can’t, or if it wakes him up, up I get and throw the thing in a drawer. If only the thing could be silent during it’s transmission, I don’t think the fact that it lights up would wake us because we have so many other electronic lights in the room.

 

Supposedly, we are earning points for this, kind of like credit card reward points. You don’t actually get that many from the transmissions. Most seem to come from a willingness to do surveys. And still, I’m looking at maybe 1,000/month. And it seems like most things in their catalogue cost around 18,000. 18 months before I can see a substantial reward for being woken up weekly in the middle of the night?

I’m not certain we can stick with it that long.