I don’t know if it’s strange but my all time favorite way to make easy money was trimming. I could easily make a couple thousand a day just hanging out with friends, that’s the only work I did until I finished college. Honestly, if legalization didn’t tank the price I’d still do it but nobody is paying $500 a pound to trimmers anymore.
Did an MRI and then a CT scan with radio active fluid injected into my blood stream while being asked questions to measure brain activity at my university. Made $150. Did not enjoy the MRI.
Okay this was kinda wild—one day I found brand new copies of Titanfall 2 at Dollarama for $4 each. I grabbed like 20 without really thinking, and ended up flipping them for $25 each. Didn’t expect it to actually work, but it turned out to be such a lucky find.
I was a turkey catcher. A couple days before Thanksgiving I would stand in a fridge room and catch turkeys as they came off the truck from the farm once processed, and sort them by weight and size.
I helped out the field maintenance crews at a couple of youth soccer tournaments many years ago, and got paid for my work entirely in $1 bills from the soda vending machines.
Back in the 80s, in the summer, we would take the bus to the beach from 13-16 years old, and on the way back we would stop at Knotts Berry Farm, there were always hundreds of people buying tickets to get in. We would get a transfer pass to get back on the bus for free, then tell people “my parents dropped us off, but the price of tickets went up a $ and I am short a $, can you help me?” In about an hour, we would get about $20, then go back the next day and go to Studio K, I think tickets back then were about $20 at 6:00pm. Also back then, you could scrape a penny down to a dime size and fool the parking meters.
Helped pay for college by being a lab rat for a company doing drug trials. The trick was picking the studies of innocuous drugs that had a history of being safe but were coming out in a new form. Easiest money I’ve ever made. Bonus was the money turned out not to be taxable either 🙂
got paid to stand and look concerned and ask a couple questions at a company where I don’t even work, so that the person doing a certain job would think I might be the client. The project was late, the owner wanted the person to hurry up. And I just have that kind of face.
So I just looked like I was thinking about a lot of things, sort of distracted like I didn’t have time to be there, was replying to annoying text messages, and would then look up and ask a couple random technical questions- not in a disrespectful way or to slow the guy down, just to seem like I was having thoughts about all the tech systems involved like I’d done this a thousand times and there was a million dollars at stake.
I should have gotten a Tony Award. I mean a real client wouldn’t have done any better. I didn’t scare him or piss him off, I just made it seem super important. The owner was cracking up in the office and said he believed me.
I tended my friends indoor cannabis grow. It’s legal here. Except his setup was fuckin jank. Cinder block towers with 5 gallon bucket on top. About 25 in a 10 by 10. Lots of fans with no guards, everything had to be just so. I would have to strip down and contort my body to water each one, check lights, groom and clip, and when a male popped in the center had to perform crop surgery. It felt really sexual even though I was completely alone for weeks. Great routine. Would not recommend the set up
Wayyyy back when Beanie Babies were huge, a woman paid me to go into a store and buy a specific one—I couldn’t tell you which—because they had limited the sale of them to one per customer. I was just sitting outside on a bench, smoking a cigarette, when she approached me… I didn’t make much, maybe $20; but it was odd, and it was easy money.
On a cruise ship we bought 4 beers as the last bar open closed on the last night of the cruise. Some guy gave us €50 for two of them because he missed the last call.
When I was in Grade 7 I bought a box of the big sticks of Bazooka bubble gum for $3.60 and was sitting in class and the kid next to me handed me a quarter for a piece. I made enough to buy 2 boxes the next day. And started my in-class bubble gum hustle. Was alot bit it kept me in free bubble gum for myself for the rest of the year. And a locker half full of gum.
I showed up at a house party with some friends and stood outside on the porch charging people a $5 cover fee to get in lol. I didn’t even know the people that lived there and there definitely was no cover fee. I made enough that my friends and I left to order a pizza and some drinks together and watched a movie at my house at the end of the night.
opened up to a woman in the hospital about my mom dying upstairs and she gave me $40, only a few days ago but i really appreciate her. i wasn’t going to be able to get anything from the hospital as i only had a couple of dollars but was going to the cafeteria to check what they had. wonderful woman and i saw her later after my mom passed and cried while hugging her.
A new poker site was once running a game of chance with slight odds in favor of the player on some sort of slot machines (they were new and trying to get customers so hosted a holiday event) I used a script to basically run multiple sessions through just code so that I wouldn’t have to sit there watching the animation every time I clicked to spin the slots, ran it for a couple of days before they caught on. Made my first few mortgage payments with the money I made
Selling snow cones (literal crushed ice & colored syrup) in a novelty cup for $25 a piece at monster truck shows. It must really be painful to pay off $200 worth of SNOW CONES on your credit card bill. I made snow cones for 3 1/2 hours straight!
Flipping free couches I found on Facebook marketplace. Most were already on the curb. My bro and I would rent a uhaul and pick them up, take nice pics and post them. We sold them for $400-500 each. Easiest money ever but you do have to have a place to store them.
Some lady requested THROUGH CRAIGSLIST for a photographer to take pictures of her holding a cake outside of a local landmark. I had just been gifted a nice camera so I told her I was a photographer. Easiest $50 bucks I ever made. Pictures were not professional at all but she paid .
Being a test subject for pulse oximeters that the company I worked for made. They would put a mask on you to lower your oxygen saturation and made you do certain hand movements to interfere with the oximeter. Paid $50 for an hour’s work and on company time.
I was strapped for cash in mid-2021. I put an ad out on Craigslist for some side work. A day or two goes by, and I get an email asking if I had work boots, which is a fair question without further context. Fast forward to the reply, when the person asks if they’re used and would I sell them. Now it’s a bit strange to me. I say yes, assuming he needs a larger pair for his job and can’t find 15’s, but I was mistaken. He offered $300 for a pair of used shoes and 2 pairs of used socks. I knew in my soul that this purchase wasn’t a PG transaction, but $300 at the time was life-changing. I proceeded to meet him at a gas station off of a hwy exit, made the exchange, got my cash, and I’d do that deal every day of the week, if I could.
It passed out flyers for this woman the named Debbie Merrill who was a mildly iconic roller skating pop culture figure in the 1970s and ’80s. She was well past her prime by the time I started passing out flyers for and working in her office. Business was slow going. She was super bossy but I didn’t mind because she was way too skinny, wiry, and weird to be threatening.
soy mesera y me han dejado dos veces buena propina por explicar porque la coca de vidrio sabe mejor y porque era necesario saber como almacenar las cosas y porque le ayude con su tarea a una niña
también me dedique a vender postres un profesor amaba el flan que hacia con poca azucar un dia llego y dijo si me invitan un flan no doy clases vendí lo que me quedaba el profesor se llevo como 4 flanes a su casa y no tuve dos horas de clases
When I was 18 I got hired by the Alcoholic Beverage Control to go into liquor stores and order alcohol to see if they would card me correctly. I wasn’t allowed to lie, we weren’t trying to trap or trick anyone, and had to be honest about my age when asked. If they sold, I would go back out to the police car and the officer would go in and ticket them.
The thing is, they could lose their liquor license if they failed a few times. So one of the times a store sold to me, I went out to the police car while the officer went in, and the owner snuck around the side and ran up and started to bash the back window of the police car I was in, yelling at me. Not gonna lie, even with the officer just inside I was pretty scared after that. They wouldn’t have us do this in our own town (we drove about an hour away) because they didn’t want to take a chance that someone would recognize us and I’m damn glad. I was just a kid trying to make a buck, and there’s no chance I looked 21 (they picked kids who purposefully looked young and not old enough, because again they weren’t trying to just trick people, wanted to give them a fair chance) so just do your job and card me correctly and it wouldn’t be an issue.
Hacking NoDrop equipment and selling it on eBay in EverQuest the first few years it was around. I made around 15,000$ a year for the two years I did it. Had a whole racket setup with the GM of my guild that was ruthlessly blocking people from plane of hate/plane of fear.
I was in the first ever focus group for the movie Transformers (the Shia one) and Avatar (the M Night one). I got paid $300 to talk shit on both movies at the age of 15
My mom signed me and my brother up for flu vaccine 4th stage medical testing at some neurologist office, an hour away from home, they gave me a debt card with 100$ added per visit, and 500$ total, i was like 14 yo that was good mf money
I told my older sister that was 17 living in that area on her own, her and her heroin boyfriend did an ebola vaccine study that paid $8k total, wild times
Honestly im pretty broke, im probably gonna go see whats up with that place
I was a big shit talker and instigator I would find out who had beef in my neighborhood / school and would stoke the flames till they wanted to fight I’d set up the place and charge the neighborhood kids a few bucks for the location right before to watch . I would take some of the profit and buy spicy chips and ibc root beer and candy and would sell it at the fights and out of my bedroom window
Worked at a campground as a teen, some of the male staff paid me to do their laundry. I had a no underwear policy. They lasted about 4 weeks before they caved and learned to do it themselves 🤢 so they could have clean undies!
I was a very good french horn player in my youth. Many years ago I took a gig where I went by a dead person’s name for a weekend and played a post horn in uniform on horseback for a bunch of rich people who were reenacting a fox hunt that occurred 300 years prior for a town celebration in the Berkshires.
Test subject in psychological tests. I very quickly realized if I said I was suicidal they would ask more questions and you got paid more. So I started making shit up. This was >30 years ago in college. I needed the cash.
Packing lady bugs into cloth bags full of excelsior (which is basically a Brillo pad made of wood)
We always worked near dawn right after the refrigerated delivery truck arrived. We had to have the whole batch divvied up, put into bags, bags but into display boxes and into the walk in cooler before the little beetles warmed up too much.
Cold temps make them lethargic, so they are easy to scoop up. But you can’t use a plastic scoop because that would damage too many of the critters. You had to scoop by hand into a lil cup, weigh them and then transfer to the bags. If you wait too long, they warm up and start escaping everywhere. Lady bugs fly remarkably well.
Do that for four hours and your hands get remarkably red, sore and chapped to fuck. Handling the excelsior would be like working with bales of straw. Your forearms get abraded as fuck. My hands and arms used to ache for DAYS after a shift.
I walked into a place one time and they told me to come in 5 days a week, from 8am-4pm, in exchange for money. It’s going okay I suppose. Still feels weird.
Some guy asked me to watch his truck for ten bucks while he was loading it up for moving. Also insisted on carrying weed across a nonlegalized state to get back home.
Reselling auto accessories from my workplace that has minor defects.
I used to work as a car dealership tech and often times something minor would break on a car accessory. The procedure is the customer would get an entirely new item rather than repairing said defect. For example we had to warranty a bed cover for a truck because one strap broke. The manufacturer doesn’t want the part back so rather than throwing it out I’d resell it, fully disclosing the issue to the new buyer. Other parts I’ve sold were running boards, rims, and roof racks. I probably made anywhere between $200-$500 per item sold.
When I first moved to L.A. (1984, I’m old) I picked up some day labor jobs at Manpower. One day they sent me to I Magnin in Beverley Hills. I spent the day cataloging Bob Mackie gowns. They didn’t ask me back.
i worked for a moving company for a 2nd job during the summer a few years ago.
i sold cars for a bit so when i was unloading trucks and stuff i would chat with the customers.
i helped a few people buy new cars, they got really good deals (got paid over KBB for their trade ins).. i also helped a few people build computers by giving them a parts list and then i built it in their home.
i never asked for any money and i never expected any except from the dealerships they gave me a cut called a “bird dog fee” it was like $50.. then the customer also tossed me like $100 on average.
one guy paid for a $8000 pc and i was excited to build it and set up his room with him, he tipped me a grand afterwards.. he seemed really upset i was trying to decline it because thats a ton of money
Standing over a whole bolt of jersey knit cotton t shirt material spread out on the floor and my job was to take a big paintbrush dipped in fabric dye and splatter spots all over the entire bolt.
I once took a picture of a seemingly random item during a trade fair. Put it up on my web gallery (think Flickr, but earlier, this was 2004) and forgot about it. A couple weeks later, I get an e-mail from the Financial Times asking where to send the 50$ check. They had found and used the image for their paper.
When I was younger, I met someone who said I had a nice laugh. Two weeks later, I landed a commercial as a voice actor and all I had to do was record different versions of my laugh. I then went on to become a voice actor for other commercials but that was a weird start.
When I was a kid around xmas I would gather this particular evergreen shrub that people made wreaths and grave blankets from.
In college I worked for a taste testing/ food research company, I would chew and spit out lunch meats, mac and cheeses, or sometimes just cups of liquid, and rate how sweet or bitter or otherwise how they were.
Oh I’ve got two great stories for this. I used to do various odd jobs off Craigslist for side money. There was some weird shit going on circa 2009.
First, some guy posted a very vague post that just said something like work your own hours, must have reliable transportation, $15 an hour. I emailed him and he responded pretty quick. Apparently the entire job was to drive around, collect cardboard boxes from dumpsters, break them down, and take them to a warehouse in the VERY shady part of Dallas, Tx and get paid $0.20 a box. Never ever figured out what they were actually doing and the whole thing was extremely sus, no names ever given, nobody ever seen, just drop off the boxes outside a roll up door and then a few hours later get money through PayPal. Super weird.
Second. Responded to an ad to do a “market study” for $150. Got picked, and told to show up at a certain time at a very weirdly nondescript small office building in the fancier part of Garland, Tx. Found the right suite and got seated in a waiting room, everything still very unsettlingly nondescript and almost purposely bland. Got my name called and was led into the most bizarre room I’ve ever seen. It was a big room, and there were little cubicles lining the walls like band or orchestra practice rooms at a school or those little privacy offices in a big hotel or convention center lobby. We had to walk past them all to reach a room at the other side. Each cubical had a glass front wall so a person with a clipboard could look in and watch as inside the cubical, a person dressed in a hospital gown with all sorts of wires and sensors hooked up to them watched a video projected on the wall in front of them walking through various supermarkets and stores or looking at shelves.
When we got to the second room, they told me to strip down to my boxers and hooked me up with tons and tons of sensor leads, and then stuck a bunch of electrodes all over my body and especially around my head. Then I was led to a cubical and sat in the chair, while someone took about ten minutes to hook up all the sensors and I had to look at a bunch of projected targets in quick succession in order to calibrate an eye movement tracker. Then I was told to just pretend I was shopping at my favorite local grocer, I was shown about 30 minutes of footage of walking around various stores and looking at various shelf’s of stuff like chips, breads, canned veggies etc etc. Afterwards I was told that they were “mostly” tracking eye movements and looking to see what customers looked at, what types of branding and what colors, styles etc gained the most attention, what typically gets the most attention, etc. fair enough, but it was sure weird and seemed like they were looking for much more.
I submitted a couple company names for a crowd sourced naming contest online and won $3,000 with 10 min of thinking. I also won $750 and a few $200 prizes
Not sure if my experience will qualify but when I was 15, I accepted to spend a week at a Christian youths pilgrimage + festival in Medugorje, Bosnia (I live in France so it was pretty far) because the guy my mom was seeing back then thought I needed god in my life and that witnessing such a grand event might convert me – I was/am an atheist. He paid for the expensive guided travel tour and promised to give me 300€ to sweeten the deal when I came back. It was pretty harmless in the end and I got my money, but I sometimes wonder if something worse could have happened, I mean it feels like the start of a horror movie… or a true crime documentary.
Obviously it didn’t work in converting me, but hey, now I have a weird fact to tell people when they ask about my life story.
At a mall. Me and a friend had some drinks and put the cup down and started hackey sacking. People started dropping money in the empty cup. Then we were kicked out for pan handling.
In the mid 70s all my friends had paper routes. They were making about 20 bucks a week, delivering early morning and evening papers.
I started going around the neighborhood and collecting the paper. Collect about a ton a week. Recyclers were paying $50 a ton back then. Then the people I collected paper from started saving their aluminum cans for me too. I was 11 years old and making almost 100 a week back then. Had to pay my dad gas money and a little extra for loading and driving the truck to the recycler.
When I was nine I went door to door selling tadpoles that I had scooped out of a pond. No one bought any, but some guy gave me a quarter to get off his porch.
I entered a 100/0 draw (Like a 50/50 but the person running it gets 0 of the money because they were not allowed by the dating message board that they used to organize the event to collect money from attendees)
I won $296 in Loonies and Twonies.
Made about $400 posting some old dudes rock music he made from the early 2010’s to SoundCloud, we still keep in touch but that whole thing is at a halt right now, hopefully it picks back up cause that was good money😭
In a small town in the midwest after a heavy snowfall I used to shovel driveways as a teen. One year my neighbor asked if I would get the snow off his roof so it wouldn’t collapse. I got a ladder and found I only had to nudge it to get most of it to slide off. He gave me four times the amount of money I got for shoveling a driveway so I spent the rest of that winter and the next one going roof to roof, making great money.
Sold 3 pairs of old high heels to a male former neighbor when he stopped to chat as I was cleaning up my garage. Easiest $300 ever made & no judgement on what he was going to do with the shoes
So there’s this multi billion dollar company that pays me thousands of dollars a month to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day and respond to “messages ” from “people” I have never seen in real life.
A dude gave me 20 bucks and a free drink of my choice to talk with him at the club so his ex would get jealous. Apparently it worked because his ex was crying in the bathroom.
As a kid growing up near a golf course, I would retrieve balls that had cleared the barrier net and landed by the road. The golf club owner would buy back the good ones.
I told my new boss, “That’s where the free money is.” He was selling new appliances, making pennies on the dollar, hauling old appliances to recycle, making pennies on the pound. He never listened. So I offered to haul the old appliances off for him. Then I started fixing, cleaning and selling them out of three-car garage I rented. Soon, I was bringing in five or six thousand dollars a month, not even working full-time. Three or four years, winter or summer didn’t matter. Somewhere in there, he found out how much I was making, so I had to share the profit with him. Then, being of a religion that’s notoriously greedy, he decided he could do the same thing himself and leave me out of it. He tried, but failed, because he was too slow or too easily distracted or started asking too much money for them. I heard later that he was back to hauling the old ones to recycle again, making pennies on the pound. All he had to do was shut up and stay out of the way and let me share the money with him. But he couldn’t do that. Apparently, his saints love him too much to let him succeed easily.
Comments
Selling poems
I taste tested ketchup
Leg model
I’m here for future prospects.
Successfully getting a refund after the lackluster sex.
1999, you could be paid to surf the internet with a browser add on that served ads
Had to be actively clicking and moving your mouse
My first foray into automation, to fraudulently surf, and get paid
As a teenager in Philadelphia, I would sell soft pretzels to the welfare line.
Made wedding cakes for spending money while in college.
Once a guy pulled over with his friends in another car and he game me $10 to throw a drink into their window
I don’t know if it’s strange but my all time favorite way to make easy money was trimming. I could easily make a couple thousand a day just hanging out with friends, that’s the only work I did until I finished college. Honestly, if legalization didn’t tank the price I’d still do it but nobody is paying $500 a pound to trimmers anymore.
Is selling used underwear sexual?
Someone asked to buy my jeans .. the ones I was wearing. Made 80 bucks
Participated in a focus group
I cleaned my room and my parents gave me money
Did an MRI and then a CT scan with radio active fluid injected into my blood stream while being asked questions to measure brain activity at my university. Made $150. Did not enjoy the MRI.
Okay this was kinda wild—one day I found brand new copies of Titanfall 2 at Dollarama for $4 each. I grabbed like 20 without really thinking, and ended up flipping them for $25 each. Didn’t expect it to actually work, but it turned out to be such a lucky find.
I was a turkey catcher. A couple days before Thanksgiving I would stand in a fridge room and catch turkeys as they came off the truck from the farm once processed, and sort them by weight and size.
Eating sticks of butter for money in college. People kept paying me to eat them so I kept doing it 🤷♂️
I helped out the field maintenance crews at a couple of youth soccer tournaments many years ago, and got paid for my work entirely in $1 bills from the soda vending machines.
Back in the 80s, in the summer, we would take the bus to the beach from 13-16 years old, and on the way back we would stop at Knotts Berry Farm, there were always hundreds of people buying tickets to get in. We would get a transfer pass to get back on the bus for free, then tell people “my parents dropped us off, but the price of tickets went up a $ and I am short a $, can you help me?” In about an hour, we would get about $20, then go back the next day and go to Studio K, I think tickets back then were about $20 at 6:00pm. Also back then, you could scrape a penny down to a dime size and fool the parking meters.
Sold clean urine at $20 per piss. It was reliable.
won a contest with one of those get rich quick influencers. like $400 and they actually paid up.
Found someones phone while aimlessly wandering the forest trails in the winter. They gave me $20
Helped pay for college by being a lab rat for a company doing drug trials. The trick was picking the studies of innocuous drugs that had a history of being safe but were coming out in a new form. Easiest money I’ve ever made. Bonus was the money turned out not to be taxable either 🙂
got paid to stand and look concerned and ask a couple questions at a company where I don’t even work, so that the person doing a certain job would think I might be the client. The project was late, the owner wanted the person to hurry up. And I just have that kind of face.
So I just looked like I was thinking about a lot of things, sort of distracted like I didn’t have time to be there, was replying to annoying text messages, and would then look up and ask a couple random technical questions- not in a disrespectful way or to slow the guy down, just to seem like I was having thoughts about all the tech systems involved like I’d done this a thousand times and there was a million dollars at stake.
I should have gotten a Tony Award. I mean a real client wouldn’t have done any better. I didn’t scare him or piss him off, I just made it seem super important. The owner was cracking up in the office and said he believed me.
I put my 1.5 year old in a research experiment.
boosting merch, not really strange, but white folks just dont understand it
I tended my friends indoor cannabis grow. It’s legal here. Except his setup was fuckin jank. Cinder block towers with 5 gallon bucket on top. About 25 in a 10 by 10. Lots of fans with no guards, everything had to be just so. I would have to strip down and contort my body to water each one, check lights, groom and clip, and when a male popped in the center had to perform crop surgery. It felt really sexual even though I was completely alone for weeks. Great routine. Would not recommend the set up
Wayyyy back when Beanie Babies were huge, a woman paid me to go into a store and buy a specific one—I couldn’t tell you which—because they had limited the sale of them to one per customer. I was just sitting outside on a bench, smoking a cigarette, when she approached me… I didn’t make much, maybe $20; but it was odd, and it was easy money.
I walked 15 feet and then handed a guy some egg tarts that he paid for, it got me an extra $5.
Translating.
Plant surveys at a landfill.
On a cruise ship we bought 4 beers as the last bar open closed on the last night of the cruise. Some guy gave us €50 for two of them because he missed the last call.
I sold my blood plasma 4 two months.
Played a game, in a survey app. Need to achieve milestone then you get money
having dinner with someone
I sell unused bandwidth. I get paid via PayPal every month or so. I’m not entirely sure what’s being received/sent, which probably is bad.
Hehe 😁by doing labouring for a whole day 😁😁😁😁hehehheeehehehehehehe
I wasn’t the one doing sexual things – when I was into leather working I make a custom cuff and collar set with D rings.
Selling peace sign wrist bands at a college spring festival
When I was in Grade 7 I bought a box of the big sticks of Bazooka bubble gum for $3.60 and was sitting in class and the kid next to me handed me a quarter for a piece. I made enough to buy 2 boxes the next day. And started my in-class bubble gum hustle. Was alot bit it kept me in free bubble gum for myself for the rest of the year. And a locker half full of gum.
I showed up at a house party with some friends and stood outside on the porch charging people a $5 cover fee to get in lol. I didn’t even know the people that lived there and there definitely was no cover fee. I made enough that my friends and I left to order a pizza and some drinks together and watched a movie at my house at the end of the night.
opened up to a woman in the hospital about my mom dying upstairs and she gave me $40, only a few days ago but i really appreciate her. i wasn’t going to be able to get anything from the hospital as i only had a couple of dollars but was going to the cafeteria to check what they had. wonderful woman and i saw her later after my mom passed and cried while hugging her.
Getting a job
If you think about it, selling plasma is incredible weird
In graduate school I was one of seven math tutors for a 9 year old math prodigy
Door-to-door music buying club salesman.
I was at a house party back in grad school, and some random dude offered me $20 to jump in the swimming pool with my clothes on.
Easiest $20 I’ve ever made.
I’m a dude, btw, and nothing about this seemed sexual as far as I could tell.
A new poker site was once running a game of chance with slight odds in favor of the player on some sort of slot machines (they were new and trying to get customers so hosted a holiday event) I used a script to basically run multiple sessions through just code so that I wouldn’t have to sit there watching the animation every time I clicked to spin the slots, ran it for a couple of days before they caught on. Made my first few mortgage payments with the money I made
Selling snow cones (literal crushed ice & colored syrup) in a novelty cup for $25 a piece at monster truck shows. It must really be painful to pay off $200 worth of SNOW CONES on your credit card bill. I made snow cones for 3 1/2 hours straight!
I sold atomic fireballs in 4th grade. I’d buy a bag and sell em for a dime a piece and make a few bucks on the playground.
Flipping free couches I found on Facebook marketplace. Most were already on the curb. My bro and I would rent a uhaul and pick them up, take nice pics and post them. We sold them for $400-500 each. Easiest money ever but you do have to have a place to store them.
Ear piercing
Selling vacuums to people who didn’t need vacuums
Got wasted for police cadets to do field sobriety tests during training
Painting a fence in heavy rain
Some lady requested THROUGH CRAIGSLIST for a photographer to take pictures of her holding a cake outside of a local landmark. I had just been gifted a nice camera so I told her I was a photographer. Easiest $50 bucks I ever made. Pictures were not professional at all but she paid .
Selling horseshit. By the truckload.
Working from home still seems strange to me, but I’ve been doing it for four years now. IT job.
I worked sorting kangaroo scrotums for size.
It was almost 30 years ago and I can still almost taste that smell.
Go ahead. AMA.
Idk, I guess when I got a few bucks for making a single successful basketball shot lol
Being a test subject for pulse oximeters that the company I worked for made. They would put a mask on you to lower your oxygen saturation and made you do certain hand movements to interfere with the oximeter. Paid $50 for an hour’s work and on company time.
I did an experiment in college for $100, where I got drunk as shit and shocked myself.
I was strapped for cash in mid-2021. I put an ad out on Craigslist for some side work. A day or two goes by, and I get an email asking if I had work boots, which is a fair question without further context. Fast forward to the reply, when the person asks if they’re used and would I sell them. Now it’s a bit strange to me. I say yes, assuming he needs a larger pair for his job and can’t find 15’s, but I was mistaken. He offered $300 for a pair of used shoes and 2 pairs of used socks. I knew in my soul that this purchase wasn’t a PG transaction, but $300 at the time was life-changing. I proceeded to meet him at a gas station off of a hwy exit, made the exchange, got my cash, and I’d do that deal every day of the week, if I could.
Place I work at uses a training platform called Axonifys
I’d offer all the new employees to do their trainings for them for $100
Like 70-80% of them took me up on the offer
It passed out flyers for this woman the named Debbie Merrill who was a mildly iconic roller skating pop culture figure in the 1970s and ’80s. She was well past her prime by the time I started passing out flyers for and working in her office. Business was slow going. She was super bossy but I didn’t mind because she was way too skinny, wiry, and weird to be threatening.
By watching unnecessary advertisement
DJing. What a scam. Easiest money I ever made.
Delivered an ice sculpture to a country club when I was 17.
soy mesera y me han dejado dos veces buena propina por explicar porque la coca de vidrio sabe mejor y porque era necesario saber como almacenar las cosas y porque le ayude con su tarea a una niña
también me dedique a vender postres un profesor amaba el flan que hacia con poca azucar un dia llego y dijo si me invitan un flan no doy clases vendí lo que me quedaba el profesor se llevo como 4 flanes a su casa y no tuve dos horas de clases
When I was 18 I got hired by the Alcoholic Beverage Control to go into liquor stores and order alcohol to see if they would card me correctly. I wasn’t allowed to lie, we weren’t trying to trap or trick anyone, and had to be honest about my age when asked. If they sold, I would go back out to the police car and the officer would go in and ticket them.
The thing is, they could lose their liquor license if they failed a few times. So one of the times a store sold to me, I went out to the police car while the officer went in, and the owner snuck around the side and ran up and started to bash the back window of the police car I was in, yelling at me. Not gonna lie, even with the officer just inside I was pretty scared after that. They wouldn’t have us do this in our own town (we drove about an hour away) because they didn’t want to take a chance that someone would recognize us and I’m damn glad. I was just a kid trying to make a buck, and there’s no chance I looked 21 (they picked kids who purposefully looked young and not old enough, because again they weren’t trying to just trick people, wanted to give them a fair chance) so just do your job and card me correctly and it wouldn’t be an issue.
Hacking NoDrop equipment and selling it on eBay in EverQuest the first few years it was around. I made around 15,000$ a year for the two years I did it. Had a whole racket setup with the GM of my guild that was ruthlessly blocking people from plane of hate/plane of fear.
Throwing rocks into a road, and “planting” dead sticks in the absolute middle of nowhere.
Made $10k+/yr playing cornhole back when I was good at it.
I was in the first ever focus group for the movie Transformers (the Shia one) and Avatar (the M Night one). I got paid $300 to talk shit on both movies at the age of 15
In 1978, I was a perfume sniper.
My mom signed me and my brother up for flu vaccine 4th stage medical testing at some neurologist office, an hour away from home, they gave me a debt card with 100$ added per visit, and 500$ total, i was like 14 yo that was good mf money
I told my older sister that was 17 living in that area on her own, her and her heroin boyfriend did an ebola vaccine study that paid $8k total, wild times
Honestly im pretty broke, im probably gonna go see whats up with that place
I was a big shit talker and instigator I would find out who had beef in my neighborhood / school and would stoke the flames till they wanted to fight I’d set up the place and charge the neighborhood kids a few bucks for the location right before to watch . I would take some of the profit and buy spicy chips and ibc root beer and candy and would sell it at the fights and out of my bedroom window
Worked at a campground as a teen, some of the male staff paid me to do their laundry. I had a no underwear policy. They lasted about 4 weeks before they caved and learned to do it themselves 🤢 so they could have clean undies!
$20 to shave my head in college. 20 dollars was worth more 20 years ago. Still not enough to shave your head but I was pretty poor at the time.
Drank a glass of coke with ketchup, mustard, brown sauce, sugar and pepper in it for £20 when I was 19ish.
Some kid gave me 20$ to see my hairline when I was a freshman in high school
I was a very good french horn player in my youth. Many years ago I took a gig where I went by a dead person’s name for a weekend and played a post horn in uniform on horseback for a bunch of rich people who were reenacting a fox hunt that occurred 300 years prior for a town celebration in the Berkshires.
Test subject in psychological tests. I very quickly realized if I said I was suicidal they would ask more questions and you got paid more. So I started making shit up. This was >30 years ago in college. I needed the cash.
Packing lady bugs into cloth bags full of excelsior (which is basically a Brillo pad made of wood)
We always worked near dawn right after the refrigerated delivery truck arrived. We had to have the whole batch divvied up, put into bags, bags but into display boxes and into the walk in cooler before the little beetles warmed up too much.
Cold temps make them lethargic, so they are easy to scoop up. But you can’t use a plastic scoop because that would damage too many of the critters. You had to scoop by hand into a lil cup, weigh them and then transfer to the bags. If you wait too long, they warm up and start escaping everywhere. Lady bugs fly remarkably well.
Do that for four hours and your hands get remarkably red, sore and chapped to fuck. Handling the excelsior would be like working with bales of straw. Your forearms get abraded as fuck. My hands and arms used to ache for DAYS after a shift.
I walked into a place one time and they told me to come in 5 days a week, from 8am-4pm, in exchange for money. It’s going okay I suppose. Still feels weird.
Some guy asked me to watch his truck for ten bucks while he was loading it up for moving. Also insisted on carrying weed across a nonlegalized state to get back home.
I briefly worked at an illegal dispensary that was disguised as an iPhone repair store.
Reselling auto accessories from my workplace that has minor defects.
I used to work as a car dealership tech and often times something minor would break on a car accessory. The procedure is the customer would get an entirely new item rather than repairing said defect. For example we had to warranty a bed cover for a truck because one strap broke. The manufacturer doesn’t want the part back so rather than throwing it out I’d resell it, fully disclosing the issue to the new buyer. Other parts I’ve sold were running boards, rims, and roof racks. I probably made anywhere between $200-$500 per item sold.
When I first moved to L.A. (1984, I’m old) I picked up some day labor jobs at Manpower. One day they sent me to I Magnin in Beverley Hills. I spent the day cataloging Bob Mackie gowns. They didn’t ask me back.
A man wanted me to play with his hair while we watched tv and that was it. rated pg
I was a grave digger in college. Really mostly a groundskeeper/landscaper at a cemetery, but I also dig the graves.
Honestly it was one of my favorite jobs.
i worked for a moving company for a 2nd job during the summer a few years ago.
i sold cars for a bit so when i was unloading trucks and stuff i would chat with the customers.
i helped a few people buy new cars, they got really good deals (got paid over KBB for their trade ins).. i also helped a few people build computers by giving them a parts list and then i built it in their home.
i never asked for any money and i never expected any except from the dealerships they gave me a cut called a “bird dog fee” it was like $50.. then the customer also tossed me like $100 on average.
one guy paid for a $8000 pc and i was excited to build it and set up his room with him, he tipped me a grand afterwards.. he seemed really upset i was trying to decline it because thats a ton of money
I went to my construction job for 30 years. Weird huh?
i was paie to pretend I was a russian vampire hunter in a zoo. (I’m not even russian)
Also, watching yogourt pots go down in a hole.
Standing over a whole bolt of jersey knit cotton t shirt material spread out on the floor and my job was to take a big paintbrush dipped in fabric dye and splatter spots all over the entire bolt.
I once took a picture of a seemingly random item during a trade fair. Put it up on my web gallery (think Flickr, but earlier, this was 2004) and forgot about it. A couple weeks later, I get an e-mail from the Financial Times asking where to send the 50$ check. They had found and used the image for their paper.
Cutting grass, I loved my old lawn route but it got weird at times
When I was younger, I met someone who said I had a nice laugh. Two weeks later, I landed a commercial as a voice actor and all I had to do was record different versions of my laugh. I then went on to become a voice actor for other commercials but that was a weird start.
I got paid to do concept artwork for a cat litter commercial a long time ago. I don’t know if it ever got made lol
selling butt scratchers at the stadium, Peter
depending on the amount of driver, RC drag racing.
one of the larger events can have up to a 25k payout for a three second race
When I was a kid around xmas I would gather this particular evergreen shrub that people made wreaths and grave blankets from.
In college I worked for a taste testing/ food research company, I would chew and spit out lunch meats, mac and cheeses, or sometimes just cups of liquid, and rate how sweet or bitter or otherwise how they were.
Double down on 20 when dealer shows a jack or an ace.
Oh I’ve got two great stories for this. I used to do various odd jobs off Craigslist for side money. There was some weird shit going on circa 2009.
First, some guy posted a very vague post that just said something like work your own hours, must have reliable transportation, $15 an hour. I emailed him and he responded pretty quick. Apparently the entire job was to drive around, collect cardboard boxes from dumpsters, break them down, and take them to a warehouse in the VERY shady part of Dallas, Tx and get paid $0.20 a box. Never ever figured out what they were actually doing and the whole thing was extremely sus, no names ever given, nobody ever seen, just drop off the boxes outside a roll up door and then a few hours later get money through PayPal. Super weird.
Second. Responded to an ad to do a “market study” for $150. Got picked, and told to show up at a certain time at a very weirdly nondescript small office building in the fancier part of Garland, Tx. Found the right suite and got seated in a waiting room, everything still very unsettlingly nondescript and almost purposely bland. Got my name called and was led into the most bizarre room I’ve ever seen. It was a big room, and there were little cubicles lining the walls like band or orchestra practice rooms at a school or those little privacy offices in a big hotel or convention center lobby. We had to walk past them all to reach a room at the other side. Each cubical had a glass front wall so a person with a clipboard could look in and watch as inside the cubical, a person dressed in a hospital gown with all sorts of wires and sensors hooked up to them watched a video projected on the wall in front of them walking through various supermarkets and stores or looking at shelves.
When we got to the second room, they told me to strip down to my boxers and hooked me up with tons and tons of sensor leads, and then stuck a bunch of electrodes all over my body and especially around my head. Then I was led to a cubical and sat in the chair, while someone took about ten minutes to hook up all the sensors and I had to look at a bunch of projected targets in quick succession in order to calibrate an eye movement tracker. Then I was told to just pretend I was shopping at my favorite local grocer, I was shown about 30 minutes of footage of walking around various stores and looking at various shelf’s of stuff like chips, breads, canned veggies etc etc. Afterwards I was told that they were “mostly” tracking eye movements and looking to see what customers looked at, what types of branding and what colors, styles etc gained the most attention, what typically gets the most attention, etc. fair enough, but it was sure weird and seemed like they were looking for much more.
I submitted a couple company names for a crowd sourced naming contest online and won $3,000 with 10 min of thinking. I also won $750 and a few $200 prizes
Not sure if my experience will qualify but when I was 15, I accepted to spend a week at a Christian youths pilgrimage + festival in Medugorje, Bosnia (I live in France so it was pretty far) because the guy my mom was seeing back then thought I needed god in my life and that witnessing such a grand event might convert me – I was/am an atheist. He paid for the expensive guided travel tour and promised to give me 300€ to sweeten the deal when I came back. It was pretty harmless in the end and I got my money, but I sometimes wonder if something worse could have happened, I mean it feels like the start of a horror movie… or a true crime documentary.
Obviously it didn’t work in converting me, but hey, now I have a weird fact to tell people when they ask about my life story.
Hosted a television fishing show in the 80s while I was a student. They wanted a young woman and I fit the bill.
At a mall. Me and a friend had some drinks and put the cup down and started hackey sacking. People started dropping money in the empty cup. Then we were kicked out for pan handling.
In the mid 70s all my friends had paper routes. They were making about 20 bucks a week, delivering early morning and evening papers.
I started going around the neighborhood and collecting the paper. Collect about a ton a week. Recyclers were paying $50 a ton back then. Then the people I collected paper from started saving their aluminum cans for me too. I was 11 years old and making almost 100 a week back then. Had to pay my dad gas money and a little extra for loading and driving the truck to the recycler.
When I was 13 my high school art teacher bought one of my assignments for $60. She only gave me a B- for it.
When I was nine I went door to door selling tadpoles that I had scooped out of a pond. No one bought any, but some guy gave me a quarter to get off his porch.
I was a touring cage fighter and tournament kickboxer for 6 years. It’s awfully weird to look back and say, “I used to punch people for a living.”
I entered a 100/0 draw (Like a 50/50 but the person running it gets 0 of the money because they were not allowed by the dating message board that they used to organize the event to collect money from attendees)
I won $296 in Loonies and Twonies.
Scraping bird shit off my boss’s pool, then decorating it with plastic snakes “to scare the birds away.”
Made about $400 posting some old dudes rock music he made from the early 2010’s to SoundCloud, we still keep in touch but that whole thing is at a halt right now, hopefully it picks back up cause that was good money😭
When I lost my job I had to sell some of my prized designer handbags. 3 Louis Vuitton’s that I lived off of for 3 months. 😢
In a small town in the midwest after a heavy snowfall I used to shovel driveways as a teen. One year my neighbor asked if I would get the snow off his roof so it wouldn’t collapse. I got a ladder and found I only had to nudge it to get most of it to slide off. He gave me four times the amount of money I got for shoveling a driveway so I spent the rest of that winter and the next one going roof to roof, making great money.
Sold 3 pairs of old high heels to a male former neighbor when he stopped to chat as I was cleaning up my garage. Easiest $300 ever made & no judgement on what he was going to do with the shoes
Gaming/gambling in table games.
I got paid to create a “highlight mask” on security camera footage video for the FBI that played on local news stations.
Helped clean up after a pig barn fire. BBQ pork didn’t smell good for years after.
Put on a hat.
I counted the number of people coming through a particular parking lot entrance for two days.
It was 4. It was a major supermarket and probably got over a thousand cars each of those days, but through my entrance it was a total of four.
So there’s this multi billion dollar company that pays me thousands of dollars a month to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day and respond to “messages ” from “people” I have never seen in real life.
A dude gave me 20 bucks and a free drink of my choice to talk with him at the club so his ex would get jealous. Apparently it worked because his ex was crying in the bathroom.
Stayed in my car near a dumpster overnight and made sure no one dumped any garbage in it. Made like $120?
I ran drugs from poor people to rich people.
I microwave dirt for a living.
Family paid me 500 to follow their grandmother around her 80th birthday party dressed as the grim reaper.
A science teacher was impressed with how I painted a model of a heart and paid me $200 to paint some concrete lawn sculptures for her yard.
Had a guy who would pay me to text him throughout the day, we never met but he started trying to sext and I blocked him
As a kid growing up near a golf course, I would retrieve balls that had cleared the barrier net and landed by the road. The golf club owner would buy back the good ones.
I told my new boss, “That’s where the free money is.” He was selling new appliances, making pennies on the dollar, hauling old appliances to recycle, making pennies on the pound. He never listened. So I offered to haul the old appliances off for him. Then I started fixing, cleaning and selling them out of three-car garage I rented. Soon, I was bringing in five or six thousand dollars a month, not even working full-time. Three or four years, winter or summer didn’t matter. Somewhere in there, he found out how much I was making, so I had to share the profit with him. Then, being of a religion that’s notoriously greedy, he decided he could do the same thing himself and leave me out of it. He tried, but failed, because he was too slow or too easily distracted or started asking too much money for them. I heard later that he was back to hauling the old ones to recycle again, making pennies on the pound. All he had to do was shut up and stay out of the way and let me share the money with him. But he couldn’t do that. Apparently, his saints love him too much to let him succeed easily.