Who says capitalism doesn't benefit the poor man?

[Al B. Sure!]

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]

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

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

[Boris Godunov]

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

[Nubclear]

I do.

[Al B. Sure!]

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]

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]

CUTCO IS A CULT!

[Boris Godunov]

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

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/cutcocomplaints/cutco_vector_alcas.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/vector/petition.html

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

[MRT144]

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

[Boris Godunov]

Another good one:

http://www.dracolich.com/

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]

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]

Re: Who says capitalism doesn't benefit the poor man?

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]

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!]

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]

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

How the hell could anyone fall for this?