After more than a year of begging and pleading on my part, Rachel finally finished painting a sign for our front door. I had commissioned Joshua to make me a wood-burnt version, but something went wrong and he subcontracted to his sister on the job. The project languished, partly because I had been so foolish as to pay in advance.
Now that we live in the suburbs, we get a steady stream of door-to-door vendors, peddling everything from steaks to oil changes. Some are clean-cut, well-dressed, while others appear a little less reputable. Most of them visit at dinner time, but we’ve had a few ring the bell after 9 pm. My least-favorite is the kind who play the ‘poor kid from the ghetto’ card, trying to persuade me to buy some worthless merchandise ‘to give a disadvantaged entrepreneur a chance’. I guess the implication is that if I don’t buy anything from the young man, he’ll be forced to embark on a life of crime and it will be all my fault. For some reason, this doesn’t bring out my compassionate side.
Will this protect me from door-to-door vendors? Only time will tell …
When Kathy and I were first married, we attended a church in Connecticut about 30 minutes away from our home, and soon became close with ten or twelve young couples from our Sunday School class. One day we got a call: “I’m a friend of Paul and Donna, and they gave me your name … ”
As it turned out, the caller was an insurance agent, and had somewhat overstated his relationship with Paul and Donna. He somehow wangled an evening invitation out of me and arrived later that week at the door of our cozy little apartment on the third floor. He stayed for more than two and a half hours, alternately flattering and shaming us, using every trick to separate us from our money. At first I was torn between my usual sales resistance and a desire to treat the insurance agent as a guest in my home. Eventually, I became angry enough to get rid of him, but not before he tried (and almost succeeded) to get a list of names from us, apparently as a condition of his departure.
From that day forward, we made a simple rule: no sales people in our home. If someone wants to sell us something, then they’ll just have to wait until we visit their storefront or website. If they don’t have a storefront (which raises an interesting question: Why don’t they have a fixed place of business?), then they will have to propose a meeting place, and persuade us that their product is worth the effort for us to join them there.
If the first one doesn’t work, I’ll fall back to this sign.
It was a great rule, and we even extended it to sales and fund-raising calls: “Sorry, we won’t pledge anything over the phone. Please feel free to mail me information about your worthy cause.” We found that the telemarketers, especially pledge-drive callers, were not typically paid for mail referrals, and would quickly lose interest.
When we moved out to the country, even the Schwan’s driver only came to our house every two weeks. Nestled in the forest at the bottom of a 1/4-mile gravel driveway, 45 minutes from the nearest supermarket, we didn’t get a lot of incidental traffic. But now that we live in the suburbs again, it is another story altogether.
A couple of weeks ago, a man came by, wanting to sell me coupons good for oil changes at a local service station. He was a very smooth talker, and I almost bought the coupons, which seemed to be a good deal at the time. The only problem was that: (a) he insisted on payment up-front, (b) he was not actually affiliated with the service station (apart from his desire to sell their services), and (c) the service station was not open at the time he was selling. I asked him, “What’s to stop you from selling these coupons un-beknownst to the mechanic, and then skipping town with the money?” He countered with a thick stack of customers on my street, many of whom (he claimed) had done business with the service station before and had been well-satisfied. I guess the logic was, if my neighbors are dumb, I should be dumb, too. Who am I to set myself higher than my neighbors?
Kathy took down the outside Christmas lights, but they didn’t quite make it inside …
I offered to pay the mechanic later, after I got my oil changed, but he wasn’t interested in that kind of an arrangement. I suggested he sell my name to the mechanic for some kind of referral bonus, but that didn’t seem to be what he was looking for, either. I must have argued with this very persuasive man for at least 15 minutes, standing on my porch. As I came back inside, I growled, “Where’s my No Soliciting sign, Rachel?” Now that the sign is finally affixed to the front of my house, I hope the stream of pedestrian vendors will dry up.
How ’bout you? Do you have trouble with sales people coming to the door? Or, as in Secondhand Lions, are they a source of entertainment for you?
The neighbor boy was puzzled: “Why don’t you want anyone to come to your house anymore?” he asked my son Daniel. I can see I’ll be spending a lot of time on my front porch explaining what the word ‘soliciting’ means, and how it relates to the words ‘No’ and ‘Please’.
Trivia question for the day: What do these items have in common?
Tim
Project 366, Day 17
