I've had a ton of jobs growing up. Some of them were good and some of them were not so great. Others just kind of seemed a bit impossible and honestly, shouldn't have been offered to me. The one job that stands out in my mind was a job that I don't really understand how anyone can possibly be good at it, and that job was being a salesman for high-end vacuum cleaners. This particular vacuum was from a company that these days kind of transitioned into being regular-grade stuff but back in the 90's was something that was considered to be super high-grade and well, according to the presentation that we gave in order to try to sell it, I suppose it actually was a lot better.
The question on my mind when getting introduced to them was whether or not anyone actually needs a vacuum of that caliber and if the claims were just a gimmick or not.
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We were lured into wanting to take this job in sort of a gimmicky way so I shouldn't be surprised that the tactics taught to us as far as selling it to others was concerned being a bit gimmicky shouldn't be all that surprising. I remember the day of my orientation and how many people were there. It did seem like an awful lot of sales reps for such a niche product.
We were given a sales example, a bunch of literature, and then a sample unit as well as a kit for giving the presentation to people when we would go out in the field.
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The kit looked something like this and in it there was a bunch of ball-bearings that we would hook up to our vacuum and also some adapters that would allow us to attach it to the existing that the potential customer would have in their own home. The idea there being that our super-high-quality vacuum would be able to easily pick up all the ball bearings but their vacuum wouldn't be able to. This wasn't a trick, the Electrolux actually did suck a lot better than standard vacuums that you could get at Wal-Mart for $30 or so.
The problem here was that the Electrolux vacuum was so expensive that it better be able to pick up just about anything when activated. I don't remember exactly how much the Electrolux went for because the sales tactics were gimmicky kind of like a used car salesman uses their own tactics. We were supposed to get as much as we possibly could for it, and all of our sales literature that we provided for the customer had fake prices on them saying something absolutely nuts like $1299 on it. The actual cost of the machine was something like $100 and we were allowed to sell it for as little as we wanted to. Very few people were ever able to sell them for $1299 but some of the really sleazy sales reps were from time to time and if they did, they would pocket the rest. This was the allure of selling these things. If you could sell as few as a couple of these things a week, you could make more money than doing just about any other unskilled job.
I was sent out with a couple of veteran sales reps in my first week to witness how they approached selling. The first guy I went out with was "Frankie" and I still remember this guy's name all these years later because his entire tactic was sleazy right from the start.
We would do a test run with our vacuum on the person's floor and there was this filter on it that we could pull in and out of the thing that would show all the dust and what not that was currently in the person's carpet. There is ALWAYS dirt and dust in the person's carpeting and sometimes the amount that we would show them was pretty scary to the resident... and this was the entire idea.
It was meant to be shocking to the resident and often our residents were shocked. Were they shocked enough to spend so much money on a vacuum that they would likely need to make monthly payments on it though? That was the real trick.
Frankie did a couple of runs on this old woman's carpeting in front of her and then removed the filter several times with a concerning look on his face. He then would turn to the woman and say "maam, you have a very serious problem with your current vacuum, this amount of dust and dirt being left behind could be causing you serious respiratory problems!"
This was common apparently, to scare old people into thinking that their health was at stake when honestly, any sensible person would realize that it was all lies.
Frankie was able to make the sale to that poor old lady, but for he had been doing this for so long that he was somehow able to magically be able to tell just by talking to someone, how much they would be willing to pay for it. Frankie started a bit high, like $800 but then got all nostalgic and made up a lie about how he sold one of these to his own grandmother and it changed her life and he, being concerned for her own health, would offer this poor old lady the same price he offered his own family.
I remember standing in that living room as we finished the sales call with a certain sense of shame because this woman didn't need this vacuum and Frankie later told me in the car as we left that he never even met his grandmother because she passed away when he was extremely young. I think it was a rather obvious lie, but this was the demographic that the sales reps would prey on: They went after the most vulnerable members of society.
A day or so later I went out with another sales rep and we headed to a trailer park. These are the poorest members of society and the woman's trailer we went to had just a few square meters of actual carpeting in her place. Once again this was a poor old lady but this time she had her grandson living with her because the kid's father and mother were deadbeats.
The grandmother had terrible credit and we couldn't get it financed to her because of this. So instead, this other sales rep duped the grandson into getting the financing in his name by telling him that "if he makes the payments on this vacuum, it would do wonders for his ability to purchase other things such as a flash car, or a nice stereo with no problems!"
The real issue here was that this 2nd sales rep, whose name I do not recall, he already knew that neither the old woman nor her grandson were going to be able to make the payments.
What would happen in this situation, and he told me in the car, would be that they would make a couple of the payments, then default, then they would send someone out with police orders to take the product back from them. So this poor old woman would be out a couple of hundred dollars for a vacuum that not only did she never actually need, but now she doesn't even have it anymore.
So common were these repossessions that Electrolux had an entire wing of the building that was dedicated to repossessions. The process of getting law enforcement to sign off on the process was so common that the forms were already printed out, the only missing information was the name of address of the person who was going to have the machine taken off of them. I was told that they do so many of these that the magistrate doesn't even look at them anymore for confirmation, they just do a bulk signing every week.
This to me was very heartless work and one that kind of convinced me that most sales jobs are full of shit. We were intentionally targeting the weakest links in society and fleecing them for as much money as we could get from them. We, and the bosses of the local place and Electrolux as a company didn't care who we hurt, just as long as we could take money from them.
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Basically the job was lying through your teeth and ripping off mostly really nice and honest people who didn't have the money for a product of this magnitude in the first place.
I do not have the correct set of skills to do this. I have too much empathy for others I guess. I never was very good at sales because I think a lot of these jobs are all about tricking people and often, the people that are the most easily tricked are the people who have the least to lose.
I don't understand the mind of someone that is content with making money by scamming old people especially our target demographic, which was old ladies who are at home alone in the middle of the day on a weekday.
I lasted about a week with this job and I never made even one sale while I did it.
Later, the friend of mine that invited me in to try out that job would tell me that he rarely makes sales either but instead he would use the Electrolux equipment as a side gig and would do professional carpet cleaning service for $40 to $50 a go instead.
Normally I would find this a really nasty way of making money at the company's expense but seeing as how Electrolux's entire business model was to rip people off, I didn't think that what he was doing was bad at all.
Did you ever have a really bad job? I consider this to be one of the worst of my life. I guess it kind of makes me feel good about myself because I don't think you can convince me to be a bad person that screws over other people even though it makes me a lot of money. I believe this is a good thing.
I feel sorry for anyone who does. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of those about.
as the world becomes more competitive just generally speaking it seems as though ppl need to figure out how to be con artists if they are going to get ahead. sad
They see our politicians, CEOs, and officials of all kinds do it with impunity and without repercussions. What is there to convince them otherwise? I recently heard an argument that the word 'ruler' referred to a measuring device, and originally meant 'a person we could measure ourselves by.' Everything is topsy turvy now.
My parents bought an Electrolux vacuum and carpet shampooer ca. 1990, give or take a couple years. The shampooer is still aorund, I think. When we moved west, we briefly live din an apartment in Spokane while my parents looked for a more permanent home. The Mother Thing lent the vacuum to a neighbor, who managed to destroy it somehow. I think she had a broken fish tank and treated it like a wet/dry shop vac. In any case, that was the end of that.
I briefly attended a recruitment seminar for Cutco knives. I didn't like the feel of it. The first aid kit in my car came in handy, though, because a dumbass also attending managed to cut himself. Those knives are plenty sharp, after all, but one should know better than to have one's fleshy fingers anywhere near the slicey-dicey metal.
I worked in a call center for one of the major cell phone carriers for almost 3 years in the aftermath of the housing crash and the end of my drafting career. It was above-board, and we were inbound calls only. That meant any yahoo who saw a TV commercial could call us, though. Hitting targets was a pain in the ass, and there was always pressure to upsell. This was peak BlackBerry time, and the OG Motorola Razor line, and early smartphones. Symbian was still an option. I was there when Windows Phones launched. the horror! They were pretty good devices, really, but Android and iPhone owned that market, and Microsoft wasn't really adding anything worthwhile to stand out. But yeah, that was the worst sales job I've had.
wow... you did a lot of things. That was an interesting read man, I love responses like this because they are so rare here.
the evolution of phones was a pretty crazy time to be alive during. I think in comparison it is rather boring today because back then we went from gigantic phones to ones that got increasingly smaller and somehow managed to hold a charge for a long period of time. the "Nokia Brick" is still my favorite phone of all time but I had a Motorolla that had nicad batteries and you would get so little actual talk time with it. It was something like 45 minutes total and everyone bought additional batteries. It was also expensive as hell to have one of these things let alone the service package that was normally filled with roaming zones that it was anyone's guess if you were in one or not.
I try to actually add something when I comment. Sometimes it's a quip, sometimes it's several paragraphs.
When we first moved west, we got a cell phone because it was cheaper than long-distance fees on a landline. We were on the edge of service though, and had to stand outside to get a clear signal. My sister accidentally got a huge phone bill when she FINALLY got texts, and went way over. Now they're basically free. So much has changed.
I don't think I would do very well at any sales position. I do know that people with the right skills as well as kind of thick skin can make an absolute killing in sales... probably hot with vacuum cleaners but I know a guy that does something with optician supplies and while it took years for him to get to that point he now pulls down over $200,000 a year just in renewed commissions, these happy existing customers lead to other customers as well and the very top people in his company make millions a year in sales commission. There are also scores of people with the same job that barely make minimum wage. It's all about the right person and the amount of time they are willing to put into it.
For me I would only be able to make a sale if the person genuinely needed the product and it was for a fair price and unfortunately I think that the sales game is mostly the opposite of that just like the snakes you described in your post that would intentionally go after people they know do not need the item and cannot afford it.
I have kind of worked in sales with my own company but is a very different kind of sales. we are invited to do bids on various jobs and while sometimes it is a question of our reputation as a company and whether or not I can talk the purchaser into it, more often than not it is just a question of costs. I too couldn't convince someone to buy something that is not worth it and this is why the vacuum job was never going to work out for me.
I recently sat through what was basically a practice demo of the rainbow cleaning system (basically a vacuum that uses water filtration) that a friend of my wife is selling. To be fair, the demo was pretty impressive. But the price was more so. I also dont think the price was in any way negotiable. Needless to say we didnt buy anything though we got a free air filter out of it. And an invitation to a dinner with prizes that sounds like it was going to be like a timeshate pitch but for the vacuum.
thanks for this. I was drawing a blank when I was thinking about who was the competition for Electrolux and Rainbow was the competition.
Timeshare pitch for vacuums is a silly way of thinking about it but it is absolutely correct. I just wonder, if someone was being honest, how much better is one of these high end vacuums compared to something you can buy at a regular store for under $100
I remember seeing a vacuum salesman and the selling point was that the "Kirby" was indestructible and the domestic worker will not be able to break it. trust me this was a strong selling point as an anvil is not even safe. We eventually were given this vacuum and when the house got struck with lightning it blew up the vacuum as it was still plugged into the socket. This was genuinely indestructible and nature destroyed it.
I was headhunted for an insurance company a s salesman and turned them down as I believe this is the lowest of jobs preying on friends and family and would never stoop that low.
Kirby! That was another competitor for Electrolux at the time. I'm amazed that all of these companies are still around. I've been fortunate I guess. Nothing of mine has ever been destroyed by lightning strikes even though we have plenty of that here in North Carolina
We have been hit at least 3 times by lightning over the years. African electrical storms are epic and during the summer rainy months have one virtually every afternoon. We live near a golf course and you can hear the warning sirens going off letting the golfers know they need to get off the course due to lightning less than 5 minutes away. Not sure if Kirby is still being sold these days, but it was big 30 years ago and it was very expensive.