Tips and Time - Some Thoughts

Month 2 of Consumer tips and some thinking around Working Class Time

Welcome to All Consuming, my monthly top tips on how to break off a bit of the consumerist crust and eat it for breakfast. 

As introduced last month, this column will talk about making money from multiple email addresses. I will give a couple of examples of how this can work however these can be scaled up or rolled out as tactics in many situations. This money will not pull you out of poverty but it can give small moments of help. 

First of all, having multiple email accounts is really helpful when engaging in market research. There are many places online (e.g takepartinresearch.co.uk) that hire people for surveys which companies have commissioned to develop products or user experience. The reason why multiple email accounts are essential here is that you need to develop multiple characters. This is because the research is always targeted at specific people - for example they want a woman 35+ who works in education to trial Gins, or parents who live in Bristol to give feedback on branding for a new museum (this goes on infinitely). My accounts span age ranges, home/marital situations/gender identification/jobs - my approach to making these is that if I see a survey that I think I can get away with answering then I will sign up with a new account that fits the criteria and I will make a profile for it. I have also amended previous characters, giving them a new job or a child that would fit in with their existing narrative. 

I have made a couple of hundred pounds a year from doing this but also probably received the same annually in vouchers - this is an alternate way these companies reimburse your time and these are usually for high street brands or online stores. As a rule I never apply for something that is less than £35 and I will NEVER apply for anything that involves being put in a prize draw. 

So far I have made decent money from pretending to be an architect (a long conversation about inner city seating/street furniture), a primarily school teacher (a 1 hour chat about smart boards), a graphic designer (a too long conversation about the rebrand of a city art gallery), a mum with 3 kids (a one hour chat about the functionality of the IKEA website) and many more less memorable. You can also do in person surveys - this is a lot more restrictive as you have to go into the organisation, however there is a twice yearly UK-wide vaping survey which pays £45 in cash. It is always under-subscribed and you can attend both pretty undetected. 

Multiple emails are also useful for shopping, meaning you can get new customer discounts (often at least 10%) even if you have purchased before. The situation I often do my best work is with referral codes, this means you send a code to one of your fake addresses which gives yourself AND your fake self either shop credits or discounts. The ultimate pay off is when you do this with HelloFresh and Gusto and you can usually run this scam back to back giving you 8 weeks of ingredients for a much lower price. HelloFresh have started to get a bit wise to this and will sometimes only let you get one promo box sent to your address, but as I live in a flat I get the promo boxes sent to a neighbour with a fake name then go pick it up. 

With the food box delivery systems, as with everything, the more you buy the bigger the discount, so what I do is order for 4 in a house of 2 BUT look carefully at the offered meals so always pick the meals with the most expensive and longer shelf life ingredients. This way you can make the meals suggested or freeze some of the ingredients, or use them to make bigger, more sustaining meals that last a few days. 

You can also use multiple email addresses to be your own references for jobs - I have done this successfully many times, especially with temping agencies.

Join me next month when I start to unpack credit ratings - it could take a while. 

If anyone is currently struggling with anything financial, cost of living, debt, benefits - Citizens Advice is always your first point of call. It is free, confidential and kind. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/

Follow my substack for more - https://lisettemaymonroeallconsuming.substack.com/

IG @lisette_may_monroe

Visuals by Jason Kerley

IG @jasonkerley

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Some thoughts for this month………

I have started reading Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class - how very on brand you make think, and you would be right! 

In the first couple of pages she talks about ‘Working Class Time’ - how our time in Working Class Society is expendable. This is played out in many ways but crucially in the waiting room of any public services office. These departments - often local government provisions are regularly understaffed and underfunded and we, as service users are expected to accept that. We are forced to swallow our frustrations as any challenges to this under provision and extended delays to our day are seen as ungrateful and disruptive, this is punished with even worse service and often a lack of resolution. 

‘You just have to wait’, is the phrase banded about these services, with appointment times often insufficient to discuss and manage complex needs. This hits two fold as the amount or quality of provision offered is usually based on a points system in which service users are scored against an oblique matrix which is then checked and double checked in order to a receive service. There is never enough time to do any of this, or to account for any supported communication let alone to acknowledge the emotional labor involved in relaying personal circumstances. The only time that matters is the time inside the building, the office time. Every other concept of time must simply slip away. I have seen this happen many times and it has happened to me.  I have been in the job centre before when someone has missed a job interview because their work advisor was running late and therefore so was their appointment, if they missed their check-in they would receive a sanction, which would stop their benefits, their only source of income. 

‘You have to wait’. Other appointments canceled in hushed tones, children getting picked up by friends and family, because you have to wait. 

I have been on both sides of this coin, having relied heavily on public services for survival and for 4 years from the age of 18, I worked in local government housing providing housing ‘support’ and taking the rents in local housing offices in between and after my studies. 

In these roles I sat on a high office chair, legs swinging under the long counter with a bank teller's glass partition and money drawer between me and the tenants, taking immense amounts of rent from people living in social housing. Thousands and thousands of pounds everyday. The amount of cash we took was so vast, we bundled the notes  £200’s at a time, wrapping them in tight bundles with a red bankers tie and throwing them in a bin at our feet. The till drawers could simply not hold the amount of money coming over the counter so we just dropped it straight between our legs. This action always felt nonchalant, throwing people's money around, it was truly gross. Until the new notes came in a few years ago I could still tell if a £200 wad was over or under just by feeling it. 

People would sit for hours in the front office, waiting to be seen. To discuss repairs, community issues and most crucially rehousing. There was never any question by the staff that these people needed to be elsewhere, often waiting for hours at a time. Yet if the service user was late, for any of the myriad of reasons anyone could be late - they would be refused. They had missed the time, another appointment must be made. No grace. I remember when I first started being completely confused that the appointment time we were giving someone to have a toilet fixed was ‘9-5’, I remember she said, ‘that's not a time, that's the whole day’. I went to enquire about it, ‘If she wants it fixed, she will be in’, said a grizzly surveyor and that was that.

I genuinely don't think the people I worked with in these environments were bad people, alot wanted to give so much and had used  housing services themselves, but when you work within a system that seems to think that just because people need to access services to live that they then have time to waste you are left with little room to provide adequate support. 

I often thought how differently time moved for those waiting in the office and me working there, even though I shared situations with some of them. Me spinning my chair waiting for the day to end, getting paid for every second, looking like the young person I was, the gateway between them and getting their needs met. The go between from the back office to the front counter, telling people ‘not long now’, asking them not to shout at me when they were well within their rights to do so. 

I have also been thinking about how the idea of Working Class time can be applied to art practice. What provision can be made to account for people who are working multiple jobs and can’t leave these due to the security they provide or the family they support? Also the idea that artists should always be available, institutions can take weeks to reply to emails and to pay invoices but artists must always be on the end of the phone or email, must always hit their deadlines - even if they are working outside their studio practice.  I don't think this is just about more money, higher fees - though this will obviously help. But how can we be given the flexibility to engage with projects on a longer, more feasible and flexible time scale? I fully understand the need for institutions to be light footed but also if a show is programmed or there is interest in someone's practise how can we advocate for frequent pay drops or a longer supported lead in so the artist can make space in between working commitments. I think it's crucial to understand we don't all have the same amount of time and no one's time is more valuable than anyone else's. If we start from this baseline surely we can start to value the time of working class people and practitioners much more highly and stop putting the community under so much stress. Also we all know time is a capitalist construct, it is an abstract - so maybe we should start approaching it the same way we approach other abstract things, discursively.