Who says capitalism doesn't benefit the poor man?

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 19:12

or, Albert Speer got a job in marketing.

Yup I was hired by a marketing firm selling knives. I will get paid $16.25 for each person i show the products to regardless if they purchase or not plus I get a commission.

Almost all the employees are from similiar backgrounds as me and 95% of them just came out of high school this year or are in college.

**** sounds a bit too good to be true but some people who just got hired two weeks ago, made 1000 in sales by their second day. ****'s hot.

so who said capitalism don't work for the poor man?

thanks

FrustratedPoet · June 19, 2003, 19:16

You're selling knives door-to-door? In your neighbourhood?

Good luck with that, dude. Try not to get stabbed.

Boris Godunov · June 19, 2003, 19:17

I can't believe you posted this...it's a joke, right? Right?!

Nubclear · June 19, 2003, 19:18

I do.

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 19:18

Frustrated:

not door to door... we got this hot referral system and we make appointments with prospective customers... i'm not going to try selling around here though. i'm going to go to the burbs and chestnut hill and other upper class areas.

Boris:

what?

FrustratedPoet · June 19, 2003, 19:19

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
not door to door... we got this hot referral system and we make appointments with prospective customers... i'm not going to try selling around here though. i'm going to go to the burbs and chestnut hill and other upper class areas.

Ok. That sounds great.

MRT144 · June 19, 2003, 19:23

CUTCO IS A CULT!

Boris Godunov · June 19, 2003, 19:25

http://www.macalester.edu/~weekly/900feat.html

Quote:

When I quit that job, I went to work selling Cutco knives door-to-door for Vector Marketing Company.

Do a lot of people buy knives from door-to-door knife salespeople?

Actually, Jane, Cutco knives is the number one selling knife in America as a consequence of their extremely high quality and durability, as well as their lifetime warranty. Buy a Cutco and it'll be the last knife you'll ever buy. There are many other features of the Cutco knife that make it a wonderful purchase that I could go into but I won't. As a matter of fact, I was so brainwashed–door-to-door salesmanship is like a cult–because they make all these quasi-millennial promises about being delivered into great wealth. And at Cutco it's a big deal that you're supposed to be able to work "for yourself," but that just means you work every hour. But I was really into it. I sold the most knives in my division for the second week of August.

Did that make a believer of you?

Yeah, I was so brainwashed by Vector Marketing that when I came to Macalester, I brought my bag of knives with me because the head of my division, Mark Lovell, 25 and already a millionaire with three houses, gave us a speech and said "my first summer selling knives I didn't make any money. It wasn't until I went off to college that things really started to pick up for me and I really started to buckle down, then I sold all my professors knives. In fact I graduated from college in two years, because once you start to selling knives you really learn to budget your time. Pretty soon I was taking seven classes every semester with no effort." They make all these promises of superpowers.

Did you actually try to sell any knives at Macalester?

No, on contact with Macalester I realized what I'd become. But I did have a really nice set of knives for my first semester here.

What became of them?

I gave them to my parents for Christmas.

http://atlas.spaceports.com/~cesquire/vector.html
http://www.geocities.com/cutcocompla...tor_alcas.html
http://www.petitiononline.com/vector/petition.html

BTW, you are not in "Marketing." You are a salesperson.

MRT144 · June 19, 2003, 19:29

have you ever met somoene who has been selling knives for their entire life?

Boris Godunov · June 19, 2003, 19:31

Another good one:

http://www.dracolich.com/

Quote:

I got accepted to go through the employee training, where I maybe hired. Yay. So here I am at 12am, I am supposed to go to this training where I dont get paid for my time on June 5th 6th and 7th for 5 hours a day. Im not all that happy with spending 5 hours in training on the 6th since its my freaking b-day. Now the 'me sitting here at 12am' part comes in. I cant sleep so I decided to do some researching into Vector Marketing and the Cutco knives they sell. So with the help with my trusty user/pass to my college's massive-online-database-search-a-bot-from-hell that has just about every magazine, newspaper, journal, and the rest of those goodies that ever existed I went to work.

So here I am, 3 hours later, and I am well informed now. 99% of the information I found about Vector that was NOT on their own website or something they paid to have published was negative.

First off I have to pay for a demo set of the knives I would sell. This was mentioned in a half-assed way in the interview to where it didnt sound like you had to buy them but then again it did. WTF is this crap? I have to buy your product so I can sell your product? I dont think so. Next on the "WTF" list is the pay and money they make. You get $9.25 an hour. One appointment equals one hour of work even if it takes 3 hours to make a sale. Now say with me here. If a customer buys the $800 set of knives you are expected to sell you get commission off of that added to your base pay of $9.25. But, if that customer gets thier money back with the 30day money back deal, Vector/Cutco wants the commission you made back. Thats right, they want you to pay them if a customer returns a product. And it only gets worse. As I said, you get $9.25 an hour for an appointment, an appointment is only 1 hour according to Vector/Cutco even if it takes 3. But, you also spend time, your own time not getting paid, having to call potential customers to set up the appointments. You do not get paid for travel time to the customers or money for gas.

Now something funny. Vector/Cutco claims over $250 million in sales for 2002. Now if you do some math with the figures they give you in the interview with the number of branch offices Vector/Cutco says they have and put say 15 sales reps in each office then with the claimed "average sale" of their sales reps, Vector/Cutco should be pulling in $1,320,000,000. Thats right, 1.32 Billion, not million, billion with a big B. So either most of their sales reps sell nothing and a few sell a freaking boat load, or they lie about how much the average sale is.

Now that was just the official information I found from sources I could reference and make a nice list out of all MLA'ed and pretty (but im not, I only do it when I have to for class

). I found a ton of personal stories about working for Vector/Cutco, blogs and blogs and forums and LiveJournals and websites dedicated to how much "Vector/Cutco blows fat ass chunks". And all of it was negative, except for replys to peoples blogs and forum posts that were obviously tanked right out of the Vector/Cutco marketing department, I read most of it on the walls in the Vector/Cutco office before my interview. Every persons experience I read on the net they either ended up making no money after paying for gas and other costs, ended up owing money because of the money back deal, or just broke even from the purchase of the demo kit. Yes, some people have been successful selling for Vector, but they represent in my research about 2% of the sales reps Vector has.

The only places Vetcor/Cutco look good are on their own sites and in reviews/articles they paid for. They even go as far to reference articles that dont exist, or only mention Vector/Cutco as another brand not to buy in the last sentence.

In conclusion, if your a college student and you get a letter in the mail from Vector consider it snail mail spam and toss it. If you get an email or see an add in the paper or at school refering to "www.workforstudents.com", just ignore it because its just Vector/Cutco.

Odin · June 19, 2003, 19:36

Salesmen.

The scum of the earth. All they do is try to trick you into buying something. That IS whow you get higher up in capitalism, rip-off others.

a salesman is no better than those sh!tty telemarketers.

DOWN WITH SEDUCTIVE ADVERTISING, CONSUMERS SHOULD NOT BE CORRUPTED WITH THE BULLSH!T OF FANCY MARKETING TACTICS!

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 19:43

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
or, Albert Speer got a job in marketing.

Yup I was hired by a marketing firm selling knives. I will get paid $16.25 for each person i show the products to regardless if they purchase or not plus I get a commission.

Almost all the employees are from similiar backgrounds as me and 95% of them just came out of high school this year or are in college.

**** sounds a bit too good to be true but some people who just got hired two weeks ago, made 1000 in sales by their second day. ****'s hot.

so who said capitalism don't work for the poor man?

thanks

Albert-are you from New York?

I got offered an identical job this week-but turned it down because it sounded iffy...... their office is in an odd spot, and it sounded like a pyramid scam.

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 19:45

Cutco?

Same company who offered me a job.....

I dont know HOW they knew I was looking for a job, but they did somehow-sent me an offer.

The offer had NO description of what they do, and sounds very shady.

I called them and asked them what they do-the "receptionist" refused to tell me, and INSISTED on talking(reading) me some obviously thought out speech ahead of time.....

THEN they gave me directions to their office which were something like this:

"Go to X bad part of X bad town, go to X building, go to the back door, go in, third door on the left".

At this point I decliend, for fear this was some kinda organ harvesting ring-I thought I'd be harmed if I went to the interview and im scared these people have my name and adress.

At BEST this is a pyrmid scheme.....

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 19:54

Vesayan:

yeah they told me to go into west philly then cross over into the suburbs then go to this small building across from a car dealership and go around the back...

**** man i'm worried now... what should i do?

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 19:55

LOL reading those links....... apparently I WAS right..... its a scam.

How the hell could anyone fall for this?

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 19:56

though this is odd...

Quote:

It helps if you are a single White Male between the ages of 18 and 30 from an upper middle class family or better.

Everyone at my branch with the exception of two people are black and live in the bad areas of philly... the manager is Indian.

Boris Godunov · June 19, 2003, 19:56

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
**** man i'm worried now... what should i do?

Find a real job. Cutco is a pyramid scheme that preys on poor people.

Capitalism at its finest, yep!

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 19:57

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Vesayan:

yeah they told me to go into west philly then cross over into the suburbs then go to this small building across from a car dealership and go around the back...

**** man i'm worried now... what should i do?

This thing is a scam........ isnt it obvious? Call back, say you changed your mind.

$15.00 is AWSOME pay... especially when they mail it to random people graduating high school....... why the hell would they pay an unskilled worker $15.00 an hour, WHY would the mailing NOT tell you what they do, why wouldnt the receptionist tell me what they do......... Also I was told I would have an interview with "Mr. Fry" which is the most OBVIOUS psuedonym I have EVER heard lol!

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 19:59

Vesayan:

poor, inner city youths with public educations...

but you know what, i'm not going to just quit right away... because it's clear that some people there are making some money. I don't think it'll harm just to try it for a week or two. just to make a quick buck while i'm looking for other work.

does that sound like a good idea or should i leave now (after showing everyone this **** of course... those some good people for real when i was talking to them. all of them are very nice. ****ed up if they get cheated)?

thanks

Kidicious · June 19, 2003, 19:59

It's a good thing you have people here to let you know about the evils of capitalism Albert.

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 20:00

VEsayan:

my interview was with the manager, a mister Ankit Parikh

Boris Godunov · June 19, 2003, 20:02

AS:

Ask a few questions and insist on direct answers before committing:

1) Do you have to purchase your own set of demonstration knives?
2) How long do you have to spend with a customer to get your pay?
3) If a customer returns his knives, do you have to pay back your commission?

I don't think you'll like any of the answers.

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 20:03

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Vesayan:

poor, inner city youths with public educations...

but you know what, i'm not going to just quit right away... because it's clear that some people there are making some money. I don't think it'll harm just to try it for a week or two. just to make a quick buck while i'm looking for other work.

does that sound like a good idea or should i leave now (after showing everyone this **** of course... those some good people for real when i was talking to them. all of them are very nice. ****ed up if they get cheated)?

thanks

Albert....... you DONT want to get involved with these people.....

Get a job at radio shack LOL!

I used to work at radio-shack.

Now you might think its a hard job to get......

I was previously and very much a shut in, BUUUT I talked to a manager-acted VERY charasmatically and got the job(they dont normally give it to people under 18-I was 17 at the time).

The pay was AWSOME!! I got $12.00 base plus commision-however the store closed a month later(it was in a shopping center-they wouldnt renew their lease).

Try that!

I dont want to see ANYONE on apolyton fall in with a bad crowd..... PLEASE dont even go, nothing good can come of it, and worse case scenario you fall for their lies.

Tuberski · June 19, 2003, 20:04

I bet they will sidestep the questions and he won't get a direct answer.

ACK!

Ming · June 19, 2003, 20:04

If you have to buy the knives yourself and pay up front...
RUN AWAY AND FLEE...

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 20:05

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
VEsayan:

my interview was with the manager, a mister Ankit Parikh

I made an interview but after they gave me directions....... look its a scam: Why would they want to pay unskilled highschool students $15.00 an hour....... but they are somehow based in the back of a gas station :?????!

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 20:06

Vesayan:

I was talking to almost all my fellow trainees and they are some really great people... they're going to college which is rare in the city and they were clearly selected from the best of the charter schools. i got to warn them though but i dont got a printer and the library is closed... i dont know if i can get to the library by saturday, our last day of training and when we got to buy or borrow the knives. i wont let them fall into this trap cause they good people.

thanks

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 20:10

Quote:

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Vesayan:

I was talking to almost all my fellow trainees and they are some really great people... they're going to college which is rare in the city and they were clearly selected from the best of the charter schools. i got to warn them though but i dont got a printer and the library is closed... i dont know if i can get to the library by saturday, our last day of training and when we got to buy or borrow the knives. i wont let them fall into this trap cause they good people.

thanks

Call em at home :?

Al B. Sure! · June 19, 2003, 20:11

Vesayan:

i dont know their numbers but i can get someone i know to print out these sites...

Vesayen · June 19, 2003, 20:12

Do that then!