Your investigative shopping guide.

I research your shopping needs,
so you don’t second-guess it later.

Gregory was born on April 4th in Oakland, California, a city that taught him early that nothing worth having comes without doing your homework first.

He grew up in a house where money was respected, not wasted. His mother clipped coupons with the precision of a surgeon. His father could spot a bad deal from across a parking lot. Gregory inherited both gifts, along with an almost inconvenient need to understand how things work before committing to them.

He was, by most accounts, an unusual kid. While other children wanted toys, Gregory wanted to know who made them, where, and whether they’d still be working in six months.

The Incident

In the spring of 2019, Gregory did something he still refuses to fully discuss.

He bought a blender.

Not just any blender — a highly rated, aggressively marketed, limited-time-offer blender that promised commercial-grade performance at a fraction of the price. It had 4.8 stars. It had 47 reviews. It had a countdown timer that said 2 hours remaining.

It lasted eleven days.

The replacement parts didn’t exist. The brand’s customer service number went to voicemail, which was full. The Amazon storefront had disappeared. The 47 reviews, Gregory later discovered, had all been posted on the same Tuesday in March by accounts created that day.

He had been played.

Gregory sat with that feeling for a long time. Not anger exactly — more like a quiet, focused clarity. He thought about everyone else who had bought that blender. About the people who couldn’t afford to absorb an $89 mistake. About how much of retail is built on the gap between what something looks like and what it actually is.

He decided to close that gap.

What He Does Now

Gregory is an independent consumer researcher and editorial curator. He reads manuals. He compares specs. He tests products over weeks, not hours. He investigates review patterns, tracks pricing history, and follows supply chains back to their source.

He doesn’t sell anything. He doesn’t accept sponsorships. He doesn’t do hype.

He investigates — and then he tells you exactly what he found.

His verdicts are brief. His standards are high. His tolerance for marketing nonsense is, famously, zero.

How He Thinks

Gregory believes most people aren’t bad shoppers — they’re just outgunned. They’re up against billion-dollar companies with teams of psychologists, designers, and data scientists whose entire job is to make you spend more than you planned.

That’s not a fair fight.

Gregory intends to even the odds.

He is not here to tell you what to buy. He is here to make sure that when you do buy something, it’s because you decided — not because a countdown timer, a fake review, or a cleverly worded product description made the decision for you.

A Few Things About Gregory

He takes his coffee black. He reads product manuals for fun. He has strong opinions about return policies. He once spent three weeks testing the same type of water bottle from fourteen different brands and emerged from the experience calmer, not more anxious.

He is 5’11”. He owns a pair of round gold sunglasses that make an occasional appearance — on vacation, at the beach, whenever the situation calls for it. He does not wear them while working. Trust requires eye contact.

He is, in his own words, just a donkey trying to help.

Gregory is the mascot and editorial voice of Shop My Ass Off — a consumer advocacy platform dedicated to helping people shop smarter, spend less, and never get played by retail again.

shopmyassoff.com