Every page on this site carries a verification date, printed in the byline as the day its claims were last checked against their sources. Provenance is not gathered into a footer list; each figure names its origin inside the sentence that carries it. This editorial policy sets out what counts as a source, what happens when published sources contradict each other, how often pages are re-checked, when a topic is abandoned, and how a reader gets an error corrected.
Kroger survey Entry ID — three reported digit counts, none confirmed · Target survey reward — the figure the company never publishes · Eight franchise brands covered by one page, and why
What the verification date means
It is a claim about checking, not about editing.
A page dated 12 August means someone opened the official portal, survey site or help centre that day and confirmed the addresses, requirements and deadlines it states. On a menu page it means the company's own pages and the price listings behind each figure were read again on that date. It does not mean the page was rewritten, and it is not the WordPress modified date.
The distinction matters because the two are routinely conflated. A site that adds a paragraph and re-stamps the page as updated has said nothing about whether its figures still hold. A date that moves without a check behind it is decoration.
It is published because it is the one trust signal here a reader can act on. If a page says a survey window is seven days and the receipt says three, the receipt is right, and the date says how stale the page was.
Which sources count, and in what order
Sources are ranked, and the ranking is applied consistently.
First-party, where one exists. The company's own help centre, terms page, newsroom or sweepstakes rules. For payroll topics, the vendor's own documentation — ADP, UltiPro, Workday, Paycor, Paychex, Proliant or InfoSync. For a tax or consumer-protection rule, the authority directly: the IRS for W-2 questions, the CFPB for card and prepaid balance rules.
Published US price listings, where no company price exists. Most restaurant chains publish no national menu prices. Where that is so, a page reports what published US price listings carried on the date they were read, says as much in the sentence, and treats the spread between them as the finding. Nobody from this site visits a restaurant, and no page will pretend otherwise.
The artefact in the reader's hand. The printed receipt, the pay stub, the card itself. On several of these topics the physical item outranks everything published anywhere, including this site. When a receipt and a guide disagree, the guide is wrong.
Competing guides, for one purpose only. They are read to establish that a disagreement exists and to record what each claims, never to settle a question. A figure appearing on nine sites and in no first-party source is nine copies of one unverified claim.
Disputed figures are published, not resolved
When three sources give three numbers, that disagreement is the page.
The standard practice in this niche is to pick whichever figure appears most often and print it as fact. This site does the opposite: every competing value goes into the copy, attributed, with the spread stated plainly.
Published guides give the Whataburger survey code as 16 and as 18 digits, the entry window as 3, 5 or 7 days, and the prize as $100, $250 or $1,000. The Kroger Entry ID is reported at 15, 18 and 26 digits, and a receipt quoted in a reader comment matches none of them. One published listing quotes the same Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich at $4.95 and at $11.99 inside a single paragraph. A classic Dunkin' donut appears at $1.09, $1.39, $1.79 and $2.11, alongside vaguer ranges. Target publishes no survey reward at all, which is why third-party figures for it run from $25 to $1,500.
Three rules follow. Competing figures are never averaged into one confident number, outliers are never quietly dropped to tidy a range, and where a company discloses nothing the page says so rather than borrowing a guess.
Each page carrying a dispute also carries the way to settle it: which field on the receipt to count, which line on the stub to read. A reader who can check need not trust anyone.
Where provenance lives now
In the sentence carrying the fact, not in a list at the bottom.
Pages here once ended with a list of sources, each with the date it was opened. That list is gone, and the software behind these pages no longer renders one. It read as a scraped bibliography, and a reader checking one figure had to guess which entry it came from.
Provenance now sits inside the sentence. A page says that a company's own newsroom gives a price, that a trade directory gives a restaurant count, or that a figure is what published US price listings carried on the date they were read. A claim that cannot be attributed that way is not published.
Two things follow. No statement here is an observation made inside a restaurant or a store, because nobody here makes one. And the single date in the byline covers every figure on the page, rather than per-source dates drifting line by line.
The re-verification cycle
Rolling 90 days, with two exceptions that move faster.
Pages are re-checked on a rolling 90-day cycle, and the byline date moves when they are.
Seasonal pages are pulled forward. W-2 guides are re-verified ahead of the January 31 deadline by which an employer must furnish the form, because a page checked in March is of no use to anyone in February.
Pages naming a payroll vendor churn fastest. Employers switch providers without announcing it, and a portal address can stop working overnight. Those are re-checked more often than the cycle requires. A reader report bypasses the cycle entirely.
When a topic is dropped
Research that turns up nothing beyond the existing consensus ends with no page. Chipotle's employee portal, Aldi's employee portal and AutoZone's employee login were each researched and abandoned on that basis. Restating what nine other sites already say would add a page and subtract credibility.
The same judgement produces consolidation. Eight restaurant brands — Burger King, Taco Bell, Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, Whataburger, Dunkin', Chipotle and Red Lobster — share one honest answer on employee access: the franchisee is the employer and there is no central portal. One page about franchise employment covers all eight.
How corrections are handled
A reported error is checked against the source before anything changes, because a report can be wrong too. If it is confirmed, the sentence is rewritten, the attribution inside it is restated, and the verification date moves to the day of the check.
There is no public corrections log on this site, and this page will not claim one. A reader wanting to know when a page last changed has the verification date and nothing else. Saying that plainly beats describing a register nobody keeps.
Where a claim turns out to be unverifiable rather than wrong, it is removed and the page states that the point is undocumented. That is a worse-looking page and a more accurate one.
How to report an error
Through the contact page, with the detail that settles it.
The most useful reports name the page, quote the sentence that is wrong, and describe what the reader's own receipt, pay stub, card or employer portal shows, with the date they saw it. That is the evidence which settles a disputed figure, and nobody working from a desk can obtain it.
Screenshots are welcome but not required, and anything identifying should be removed first. Never include an employee ID, a password, a full card number or a Social Security number. A message containing one is deleted rather than acted on.
A reply is aimed at within 5 working days. A confirmed factual error is corrected sooner, usually the same day.
Advertising is kept separate from editorial
This site is funded by advertising and nothing else. Advertisers have no input into which pages exist or what any page says. No brand covered here has paid for coverage, been shown a page before publication, or been given any route to influence one. There are no affiliate arrangements and no sponsored posts.
Advertising units are labelled and never styled to read as an article. The Federal Trade Commission's native advertising guidance of December 2015 puts it plainly: an ad shouldn't imply to consumers that it's anything other than an ad. A reader should be able to tell what is editorial before clicking.
One category of business is never recommended here. Pay stub generator services sell fabricated pay documents, and several competing guides offer them as the answer to a payroll portal a reader cannot reach. Submitting a fabricated stub or W-2 to a landlord or a lender is fraud, and the pages where that temptation arises say so.
What this site will not publish
It will not write in the first person as a brand. Copy describing a company's survey as though this site ran it implies a relationship that does not exist. Several pages on this domain did exactly that before the 2026 rebuild, and were removed for it.
It will not invent author credentials, and it will not claim to have stood in a restaurant, a store or a payroll office. It will not publish a login form or a balance checker, because no guide site has a legitimate reason to collect a credential. It will not invent a figure to fill a gap in a table, or publish a page whose only contribution is agreeing with the pages that already rank.