My first experience selling at people’s door steps came in the late 50’s and early 60’s. We were blessed in Pueblo with a great YMCA summer camp in the Greenhorn Mountains, SW of Pueblo, called Camp Crockett. It was a kid’s paradise where everyday you could ride horseback, shoot 22 caliber rifles, practice archery, take hikes, make leather comb cases and be free of parental influence. Every April 100’s of kids would sign up to sell Duran Thin Mints door-to-door throughout Pueblo. My dad was a master salesman and he made sure that we followed in his footsteps. Where I lived you were competing with a whole bunch of other kids. My dad “made” us go out and take orders. So, nine year old Mark, and his seven year old sister Rita, hit the neighborhood with our own pad and pencil. It worked. When other kids were out pushing mints, we were delivering mints to our customers. We always had a few boxes left over and my dad made us go out and push them. I had a secret plan—I would send young Rita up to the door and all she had to say was, “Here are the mints you ordered”. I would hang back on the sidewalk—it worked every time. One year we won a prize for selling the most mints. We got credit at the camp store.
I honed my skills of the cold call at the door. In the summer of 1971 after graduation from college, I got recruited to sell cable TV subscriptions
door to door. Cable was a brand new phenomenon. The cable company had quite the deal. All you had to do was sign up for a cable installation and you got free cable for a month, and after that it was like $10 bucks a month. For getting a ‘sign-up’ I got $10 bucks. It was amazing—I could sell 10 of those in one afternoon. It was nothing to make $350 in a week. In 1971 that was a lot of money.
One of the things I learned was, the poorer the neighborhood the easier it was to sell. At the time it made no sense to me. Later, as I began to understand social stratification and its impact on those with less, “free cable installation and a month of free service” was a gift to those who could least afford it. They were getting 13 channels instead of the three that their roof antenna or ‘rabbit ears’ would provide.
The other thing I learned is that in the poor neighborhoods I was often invited in to sit down and visit. That rarely, if ever, happened in the more affluent places.
Today I have Comcast cable which gives me more channels than I even know about. I pay way too much for it and if I need help with it, I talk to someone in a call center that is far removed from my doorstep. Occasionally these days I will get a door-to-door experience where they are selling Pest Protection or giving away Watch Tower magazine. I am very good at saying “No thank you”. Perhaps if they were offering me Duran Thin Mints that I did not order, I would try to pay back the Karma of sending poor Rita to the door so that I could have Orange Crush and a Payday from the Camp Crockett store.
Onward and Upward,
Mark
Lyfting Me Up 