Saturday, October 18, 2008

Knife Peddlers By Rose Haag

I emailed Minsoo Kim (PO ’10) to see when we could meet up to talk about our summers selling Cutco. I asked if he could meet me at 11:00 on Thursday, or maybe at 12:30 for lunch? It’s a classic Vector Marketing trick: give two options so the client thinks he is making the choice.

Minsoo sold Cutco knives for the entire summer of ’07 in Atlanta, GA; I only lasted three days during June ’08 in Rockville, MD.

The classified ad in The Washington Post said, “Work for Students, base pay $17/hr.” When I called for an interview, the receptionist told me, “Ms. Colaro can see you today. She has asked that you dress professionally and be there on time.” All I knew was that the company was called Vector and it was a marketing job. The receptionist assured me that there would be no cold calls.

Unlike me, Minsoo knew what he was getting into. Vector sent out letters to all the students at his high school, advertising a flexible job with good pay. His friend went first and told him all about it, so when he showed up for the first interview, he wasn’t nervous.

I was, though. I walked into a bare, un-air conditioned room full of people around my age. The first interview was five of us in a small room with “Ms. Colaro,” who was actually only 19, but managed to pull off a stern mean boss face pretty well.

Almost all of us were called back for the second round, which was a 90-minute lecture on Cutco knives. Ms. Colaro lined us up in two neat rows, shoulder-to-shoulder, and tried to make us as uncomfortable as possible.

I was still scared of Ms. Colaro at the end of the lecture, when we were each called back individually to her office.
“I can’t offer you this job, I’m sorry to say, but you seem like a really positive person. You’re really attentive, I could tell you took a lot of notes, and you seem like a really nice person,” she told me mechanically. “So we’d like to offer you this job.”

Huh?
I thought I’d imagined it. Minsoo told me it’s another Vector ploy. I was such a sucker. I was legitimately disappointed when she told me I didn’t get the job, despite the fact that I still didn’t really know what the job was.

From the perspective of the IRS, I was an entrepreneur, running my own private Cutco business. Sales representatives had to build their own contact lists. We started with a list of adults we knew, and called each one using a prompt that said something along the lines of, “I need help with my new job, I need to do practice appointments, I get paid per appointment, you don’t even have to buy anything but it would really help me out if I could stop by. Would Monday at 1 work, or maybe at 4:30?” We were told not to mention Cutco unless they asked.

It’s part of what Minsoo calls the “web of unsaid truths.”

In reality, appointments don’t pay well. To make any substantial income, you need to sell knives. But the knives are high-quality, the demonstrations are impressive, and the presentation is usually convincing. After the presentation, the client is offered free merchandise if he or she writes the name and number of a few friends “who might be nice enough to listen to the presentation.” Each appointment leads to more appointments, and it doesn’t take long to build up a nice little business.

In training, they told us that even if we were the worst salespeople in the world, we would still make sales because “Cutco sells Cutco.” I don’t buy that.

Minsoo recalls, “It wasn’t me selling knives--it was me selling myself.” One family even told him they were buying the knives because they liked him.
That was just what my parents were afraid of–they didn’t want our family friends to feel obligated to buy the knives. The most basic set sells for over $500, which is a long way from a box of girl-scout cookies.

After training, each sales representative is given a binder and a booklet with the sales presentation, which is written out word-for-word. We were given specific instructions on body language for certain parts of the presentation, particularly for the closing: “Now Mr. and Mrs. _______, I wouldn’t be doing my job today if I didn’t ask you this question: would you like to go ahead and purchase your Homemaker Set, with a free pair of Shears? (look customer in the eye, smile and nod).”

Every client got the same spiel – even the family friends whom we were supposedly using for “practice.”

“Yeah, it’s a little heartless, very manipulative, and a little questionable,” Minsoo said. “But it’s just a mental hurdle you have to overcome. I never felt I was extending someone’s budget.”

I did. But on the other hand, I told myself, I wasn’t forcing anybody to buy knives. They could always back out, and as adults living in a consumer society, shouldn’t they know how to say no?

Minsoo and I both encountered a few people who were good at that. Minsoo’s had an uncomfortable moment when he was showing a set of gardening tools to an older woman. The tools were supposed to cut through a cutting board, but when the woman tried to do it herself, she couldn’t. Unaware at first that Minsoo’s visit was a sales pitch, the woman laid it out: “I think you should leave now.”

My worst moment was during training, when I called the home number of a high school classmate. His dad picked up the phone, I said my piece, and asked if I could come by the house. Mr. Bannon said, “No, you may not,” and hung up on me.

The job had me deconstructing all my ideas about money and consumerism. Minsoo, however, was more laid back about it because he thought of it as a game, and as he said, “Winning the game is never an evil. People put down money they would’ve spent somehow, and the products are good.”

It’s possible to make a pretty substantial income over the course of a summer. The more you sell, the higher your commission. There were prizes for reaching certain milestones-usually Cutco merchandise to add to the demonstration kits. The big prize was an iPhone and a night out in a limo if we sold $10,000 worth of Cutco within the first 10 days. To me, the prizes felt like bribes--an admission on the part of Vector that we were being asked to do something morally dubious.

Minsoo approached it as just another part of our consumer culture: “I can’t hate it because I am it,” he said. “Money as the root of evil is a myth. It’s not good or bad in itself. But it can cause a lot of happiness. It’s an agent to getting what you want; it’s too important to just discount.”

I sold $1070 worth of knives during my first three days, and made about $150. Then I stopped calling my manager for the daily check-in, and I didn’t show up for the meetings. I figured since they didn’t bother telling me what they were hiring me to do, I didn’t have to tell them that I quit.

Minsoo sold $18,000 worth of knives over the course of two months. He made about $6000, and became an Assistant Manager. “It made me more persuasive, made me take real risks, not care about getting shut down, and it made me work my ass off. I had six appointments in a day sometimes. It improved me. I would do it again,” he said.

When you break it down, I got paid $150 for three days of training and three days of selling – I barely broke even on gas.

I might do it again.

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