My Worst Job (and What I Learnt From It)
What Six Months of Door to Door Sales Taught Me
I was 18, I was finally an adult, I had some goals, but I didn’t have the means. I remember taking a piece of paper and writing down my goals. They were to save a thousand dollars and to get my driver’s licence. Pretty humble goals, but they loomed large at the time. My family had just migrated to New Zealand and I didn’t know a single soul there, there was a whole new world for me to explore, but first, I needed some dough.
The internet was still young in those days and one printed paper, the New Zealand Herald, ruled supreme. I scoured the Classifieds section. “Cash Paid. No Experience Necessary.” That sounded like me. I dialled the number and was invited to an interview. Despite the heat of mid-summer, I wore proper trousers, with a collared shirt and a tie. I figured out the bus routes, and I was on my way. By the time I found the office, I was drenched in sweat, not so much from the heat, more from my own trepidation. I was reserved by nature, I had never had a job, I had a weird accent, the list went on. And here I was about to attend the first real job interview of my life.
I got the job. Everyone got the job. Getting the job was not the hard part, it was staying in the job that was hard. Many didn’t even bother to accept the job in the first place, once they knew what it was. Of those that accepted, most quit on Day One. Some lasted a week, some lasted a month. The employee churn was brutal. The job was commission only, door to door sales. The product was membership cards for Video Ezy, a video rental and retail franchise. For those readers not familiar with the concept of renting Betamax or VHS tapes from a store, here is a trip back in time. The deal was we could sign up customers on the spot. They would have to hand over $30 for the membership, which included some really crap coupons, but basically they were agreeing to pay for the privilege of becoming customers, one of those weird business models that should never have existed. For each sale made, my commission would be $10.
To get to the office each day, my bus fare was $3.20. We would start at noon. First we would be grouped into teams for the day, then we would be assigned our “exclusive area” which would be marked with a highlighter on a street map. The team supervisor would hype and motivate each one of us. “You have This Street, That Street and Those Streets, all the way through to This Intersection. That’s 100 houses reserved exclusively for you man! That’s 100 wealthy households that we have allocated to YOU today. Your potential earnings today are $1,000 cash in hand!” Watching over all this was the owner of this direct marketing agency, a smooth talking, yuppie, as they were called in those days. He looked like he did well for himself.
It was 3 PM and we were sitting inside a Georgie Pie restaurant, taking a break from walking the streets. Most of the guys on the team (and it was 90% guys) were on some sort of government support, be it Student Allowance, Unemployment Benefit, or even Retirement Pension. They did this job in the hope of earning something extra, off the record, in cash. So there we were, sitting in Georgie Pie, taking a break. It had been a hard day of walking up and down hilly streets, and we had little to show for it. At least now we could have a break and shoot the breeze.
“Bro, one day I knocked on a door and there was no answer eh,” a handsome, young Maori fella started telling us a story. “So I looked through the window, and bro, there was a naked chick bro, a naked chick just lying there on the couch eh!”
We were enthralled.
“Did she buy a membership card?” asked our team supervisor.
“Nah bro, she just wanted a root.”
It was ridiculous, as humour often is, and it made us all laugh. Whether it was a true story or not does not matter, but I still remember it today, and it still brings a smile to my face to think about it.
I soon learnt to take a good sturdy umbrella with me, because it often rains in Auckland, but also to ward off the odd unfriendly dog. I walked the streets from noon until the team called it quits, which was usually around six or seven in the evening. On most days, I sold zero memberships, on other days I sold two or three. On my best day ever, I sold seven memberships and went home with 70 bucks in my pocket. That was a good day. I also got to ring the bell in the office that day, I had the sales record for the day. The next day, myself along with about half a dozen others were invited to a “Pre-management Meeting”. We were told that our potential had been recognised, that we had been identified as future managers in the sales organisation, all we had to do now was to re-double our efforts and keep up the good work.
By this time I was starting to become a bit cynical about the whole thing. The daily pep talks, the “Pre-management Meeting” that everyone seemed to get invited to at some stage, the sales technique training sessions we had to attend, the constant coaching out on the road, the dreaded phone call to my home each morning asking if I would be coming to work that day, the love bombing when you came back from a wretched six hours in the rain with a single sale or two. It was all a cult-like machine. The owners did well out of it. Of the $30 that each membership card cost, they kept $20, while we got our $10. They put about 100 of us young hopefuls on the road each day, if just over half of us made a single sale, they would be cashing in to the tune of $1,000 each and every day, seven days a week, rain or shine.
I lasted a whole six months, I don’t think I made any money from it. If I was to add up the transport costs, the food costs, the worn out shoes and socks — I probably broke even on the whole thing at best. Why did I stick with it for so long? What did I get from it? Well, for a start I just felt bad to quit, I was too young and too naive to realise that I was being exploited by merciless sharks, I actually felt bad for them if I didn’t go to work, because they had “believed in me” and I was letting them down. But there were also some positives from the whole experience. I overcame my chronic shyness, I found that I could talk with just about anybody that I came across. I developed a good ability to observe people and their surroundings, and to use that information to persuade and influence them. Although they were exploitative sharks, I did learn from them the techniques of direct selling. All I had to do in the future would be to apply the skills I had learnt towards selling a product or service that I believed in, that gave the purchaser real value, and at the same time was remunerative for me to sell. And I have done that successfully over and over again in the years since.
So yes, that was absolutely my worst job. It was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting. There was no financial reward in any real sense, I would have been better off earning the minimum wage elsewhere for those six long months. But, I learned how to be a salesman, how to be persistent, and how to talk with people. I also saw how people could be manipulated to benefit others; and I determined in turn, never to manipulate others, and never to allow myself to be manipulated again.
Thank you for reading. Did you know you can 👏 up to 50 times? It really helps writers to receive your applause. © Hypp Johnstone 2018
