My father in law, the Architect, tells a story about how he and the wife and kid took a vacation, once, at a salesman’s expense.
They hung out in a luxury condo on the coast, ate steak dinners at sales presentations, and basically relaxed in the sun and had fun for three days while a sales team hammered on them about how great this coastal resort was.
At the end of the three days, they offered him a contract and waited for him to get his checkbook out. He did not do so, and instead thanked them for a wonderful time, and tried to leave.
They about popped an O-ring. “What?” they cried. “You mean you lived in our beach resort, ate our steaks, played volleyball, golf, and shuffleboard, swam in our pools, fished off our piers, and now you’re NOT GOING TO BUY?”
The Architect pulled out the brochure, and pointed out where it said “No obligation to buy.”
They laid a guilt trip on him a mile long. He laughed in their faces, loaded his family and luggage in his car, and left them in the dust. All the brochure said was that he was obligated to listen to the sales pitch while he enjoyed their hospitality; his presence did not obligate him to anything.
When he first told me this story, I was amazed that anyone would do business that way. GUILT someone into spending thousands of dollars? Howthehell do you make any money THAT way? Wouldn’t EVERYONE just laugh in your face?
No, actually, not. I learned, when I was a salesman, many years ago, that five percent of the people will buy any damn thing, and five percent won’t buy anything, no matter what.
And a lot of people will avoid returning stuff to the store for fear of hurting the salesman’s feelings.
And there is in fact a sales model in America today where a salesman will give you the hard sell, and then act hurt or outraged when you won’t break out the checkbook. Really!
I first ran across this about ten years ago, when a company offered me a Las Vegas vacation weekend package in exchange for looking into their vacation resort. Three hours after the Mrs. and I showed up, the salesman and I were shouting at each other.
“Oh, so you weren’t SERIOUS about looking at our lots,” snarled the salesman. “You just came out here to get the PRIZE, is all.”
“I came out here to look at your RESORT, Charlie,” I snarled right back, “and I told you that at the beginning. YOU were the one who allovasudden started wanting to sell me a house you haven’t even built yet!”
“Well, you don’t have to decide right away,” he said, backing down a little. “If you could just sign this statement of–”
Too late. He’d already pissed me off. “If I’m not making any decisions today, why am I signing anything? Get that thing out of my face.”
It was not a pleasant scene, and certainly not conducive to selling me much of anything. He finally gave us the coupon for the Vegas vacation. We mailed it in like the instructions said, and never heard from the company again, thus kind of proving that we were right not to trust 'em.
…which brings us to the now. We’d ducked into San Antonio, the wife and I, to run an errand and hang out at Hemisfair – they were reopening the Tower Of The Americas on this particular day – and we decided to kill a little time at the Rivercenter Mall, around the corner from the Alamo.
The saleslady pounced on the wife while I was looking at the directory. Within minutes, my darling was asking what I thought. Free riverboat tickets, a free fifty-dollar restaurant coupon, and a three-day vacation getaway at a fancy hotel, all for listening to a ninety-minute spiel where they’d try to sell us on some kind of time share plan?
My inner thug rose to the fore. This did not sound good. Actually, it sounded TOO good, and nearly guaranteed that it was. But my darling looked at me pleadingly. She really likes weekends in expensive hotels – she collects 'em the way some people collect stamps – and it was only ninety minutes, and no obligation to buy. Please?
No obligation to buy, I thought to myself. Get that in writing. Sure enough, it was on the brochure. I pocketed the brochure, and steeled myself for the experience. I go to great lengths to make my beloved one happy. Learned to take out the garbage once a month whether it needs it or not, learned how to eat with a fork, threw away my beloved beer hat, and now this. The things husbands go through…
The saleswoman led us out of the mall, across the front of the Alamo, around a corner, and into a business office a block away. There, we were asked to fill out forms and wait around until a salesman became available. *This is coming out of that ninety minutes I obligated myself to, * I growled mentally, and sat down.
My wife, too, was beginning to have second thoughts, after ten minutes of waiting, and she was on the verge of saying, “Screw this, let’s leave,” when the salesman came out and pounced on us. He was twenty-three, very chatty, very sunny fellow. He was one of those guys who doesn’t really know how to break the ice with strangers, so he settles for asking a lot of nosy questions about where you’re from, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it here… kind of like a cop, but friendlier.
He told us about himself “so you won’t feel like you’re dealing with a stranger.” *Yeah, right, buddy, machine-gunning a bunch of random facts about yourself at me for thirty seconds practically makes you my blood brother, uh-huh. * Truth was, he told us more than he should have – he was three weeks out of college, majoring in business, and knew about as much about sales as a pig knows about politics, and it showed.
"Now, when you sign up for our time-share plan, after the presentation, " he began–
I raised an eyebrow. The poor fool. He’d tipped his hand way too soon. “What if I don’t sign?” I said.
He looked jolted. “What?”
“This thing here says you want a down payment and a monthly payment, as well. I did not look over my budget before I left the house this morning,” I said. “Do you think it wise for me to make a snap decision involving thousands of dollars immediately after a sales pitch, without consulting my bank or looking over my budget?”
“Well, the fact is, you’ll be saving so much money with our time-share purchase plan, you can’t afford not to–”
“Sure I can,” I said. “Let me clarify. I’m not signing anything today. I am not making any snap decisions today. If I choose to buy into your plan, I will do so after consulting my budget and making some important decisions at my leisure, over a period of days. If you expect me to sign something before I leave this building, you’re crazy.”
He looked panicky. “Ah, tell you what, let me check in with management,” he mumbled, and ran from the room.
My wife giggled.
I practiced my stone face.
My wife giggled some more.
“Shut up,” I growled. “You’re going to make me smile, dammit, and this would be a bad time for that.”
She giggled for a moment longer, and then restrained herself.
The salesman came back a moment later. “You’re not under any obligation to purchase, of course,” he began, a little nervously, “but if you’ll hear me out, I think we can offer you some very attractive vacation package options.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let 'er rip.”
“Trust me, sir, before we’re done, you’ll be signing,” he said with a confident grin.
Oh, you dumb bastard, I thought. *BIG mistake… *
“So,” he said brightly, “if money was not an option, where would you go for vacation?”
“The back yard,” I said, equally brightly.
He looked at me quizzically.
"Perhaps you meant ‘if money was no object,’ " my wife added, helpfully.
“Hah?” he said, not understanding.
“If money was not an option, I assume that means I would not have any,” I said, “and therefore would be spending my vacation at home. If money were no object, well, perhaps a cruise of some sort would be nice…” I spoke nice and slow, so he could keep up.
“Hm. Ah. Well,” he said, trying to reorganize his thoughts. That was when I realized that the poor bastard wasn’t thinking – he was literally *mentally reading off a memorized script, * and my interruptions and unexpected responses were confusing the poor fool to no end. I decided to quit screwing with him and let him get on with it. Mighod, is this what passes for a salesman these days? I wouldn’t have lasted a week at Consolidated if I’d been like this when I was his age…
I won’t bore you with the rest of the sales spiel. At one point, they ushered several of us into a little room to watch The Commercial That Refused To End, in which many happy customers shared their joy by repeating important facts about their vacation getaways, like:
*“Time sharing is… about… sharing time,” (Ah. Well. I’d never have figured THAT out by myself)
*"…the best thing is, it’s just like home." (which begs the question of why you’re spending thousands to go there when you could have kept the money and stayed home?)
*“As working parents, we don’t really have enough time to spend with our kids during the regular year. Our time-share really offers us some quality time to spend with our kids, every year!” (Ah. And you think that throwing money at them for two weeks a year will somehow make up for your egregious neglect the other fifty weeks of the year?)
I noticed my wife stifling a grin, there in the dark. It was all I could do not to channel Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo, myself. It was SO dumb…
“What did you think?” grinned the salesman when we came out of the Chamber of Commercials.
“It was great,” I beamed. “Downright insipid.”
My wife elbowed me in the ribs. As an English teacher, she knew damn well what the word insipid meant. The salesman, of course, did not, or perhaps simply interpreted my cheerful tone, rather than actually listening to me…
…and said, “Great! Now let’s step over here…”
We spent another 45 minutes with this poor fool, and another fifteen with his boss, who did everything he could to convince us that it was in our best interest to obligate ourselves to a large down payment, followed by several hundred bucks a month, right now.
“I will not make any decisions without consulting my budget,” I said. “I would be very interested in taking some information with me, to help in decisionmaking.”
“That’s not how we do business,” the manager said. “You see, if you’re not willing to commit now, you’re likely not going to commit tomorrow, which means you’re likely just not willing to commit next week, or for that matter, ever.”
Ah, thought my wife, is that what you told your wife when you proposed to her? But she didn’t tell me this until later. Instead, she said, “Do you have a business card? I notice your information and web address isn’t on the brochure…”
“We don’t do business cards,” said the manager. “We found that people were just throwing them away as they left.”
…so you’re willing to give me free riverboat tickets, a vacation getaway package and a coupon for a fifty-dollar dinner at Red Lobster, but you can’t give me a business card? I thought. This pretty much eliminated any concept of “trust” I might have felt for the guy or his organization, and we quickly concluded our dealings with “no thanks.”
Well, almost.
Actually, they tried to sell us a total of three slightly cheaper packages with fewer benefits, and hung onto us for a good 25 minutes over the 90 we were obligated to, until we basically said, “Hell, no.” Then they shunted us off to a receptionist who gave us the riverboat tickets, the restaurant gift cards, and a coupon to send off for the three-day vacation getaway, and then she unceremoniously showed us the alley exit.
We headed for the Riverwalk, and used the boat tickets. Amazingly, they accepted them.
On the way home, we stopped at Olive Garden, and checked the gift cards. Amazingly, they were valid, and we ate an expensive Italian dinner.
So what’s the moral of the story? I’ll bottom-line it for you, the way the salesman wouldn’t: Learn to say NO to people who want your money and want it NOW. Even if they’re giving you free goodies to sit there and listen to them.
…and anyone who can convincingly fake being married (and has a “spouse” they can bring along), has picture ID, a major credit card, and claims to make over forty grand a year can get fifty bucks worth of free restaurant goodies out of Fairfield Resorts, if you can find a salesman. And no, they don’t look at the credit card number; I wasn’t ABOUT to let them do THAT…
:dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious:
Wife and I were talking about that salesman and his boss today while we ran errands.
“You know,” she said, “if we had indicated disagreement, they’d have been on us like black on a bowling ball.”
“Urr?” I said, sagely.
“They’d have been working us apart, trying to get one of us to want the deal bad enough that the other one would finally give in,” she said.
“That seems kind of unwise,” I replied. “Do you really want to trigger a fight between spouses in the middle of your sales center, surrounded by other customers and their sales reps?”
“Yeah, but most people won’t go all Jerry Springer in public,” she said. “That’s why one of us would be expected to back down and sign up for their thingy. You know, some people would do just that, rather than go all loud in public. And the whole time, the salesmen would have been sweetening the deal, being ‘reasonable,’ and talking to the tough one of us, trying to weasel in and close the deal.”
Well, a funny thought seized me then, and I snickered. My dear one immediately asked me what I’d thought to make me laugh.
“That could be kind of funny, if we’d rehearsed it right,” I said.
“Rehearsed it?”
“Yeah. You know damn well that neither one of us was going to buy anything when we walked in there. We both knew what to expect.”
“Yeah… and?” my wife asked. Ahead, a light turned red, and she slowed down as we approached the intersection. She was drivin’, in case this is unclear.
“And at one point, I was just yankin’ the guy’s chain for fun, you know,” I said. “And that’s why (I thought) you started laughing when he left the room.”
“Were you?” she snickered. “I THOUGHT you were being a little too gruff, there…”
“You read me too well, my love,” I said. “And that’s where the fun really could have come in, if we’d been really ready to take it balls to the wall.”
The light turned green. She clicked the left-turn signal, and as we curved left, towards the grocery store, she said, “Balls to the wall? What kind of horrible evil madness are you thinking, you wicked man?”
“Your invective is exactly what I mean,” I said. “Imagine that we just kind of took things a little further than they expected. WE knew we were in agreement when we walked into that place, but they didn’t know that. What if one of us wanted to sign up, and the other REALLY didn’t want to…”
“…and the situation DID begin to get a little Jerry Springer on them, right there in the middle of the sales place,” she said.
“Goddamn right!” I growled dramatically. “I mean, we’ve got a kid in college, we’re saving to buy a goddamn house, and YOU want to drop five grand on this goddamn timeshare crap–”
“Don’t give ME that shit!” she shot right back, not missing a beat, in her best hoity-toity tone – one she never uses when she’s actually angry. “YOU spend a fucking fortune on your hobbies and shit, and you’re telling ME we can’t afford a nice vacation–”
“Well, goddamn it, woman, if YOU would get off your ass and bring in a little bacon, maybe we could AFFORD to spend–” (actually, as a department head, she makes somewhat more than I do)
“Well, if YOU were any kind of a MAN, maybe I could see FIT to–”
“Don’t you talk to ME like that, you goddamn whore!”
“You worthless limpdick sonofabitch!”
“GODDAMN EMPTY-HEADED SLUT!”
“NO-BALLED WHITE TRASH MOTHERFUCKER!”
“ROTTEN MISERABLE COW! I OUGHTTA KNOCK YOUR FUCKING–”
…and about then, it occurred to me that the car was stopped. We were parked in the grocery store parking lot.
With the windows down.
Surrounded by other people, loading their cars with groceries. Well, not any more. Mostly they were sitting there staring at us with their mouths hanging open.
My wife sat there with her mouth hanging open, too. She’d been so into playing the dozens with me, she’d swung into the parking spot and shut 'er down on automatic, never noticing all the passersby.
Perhaps I should explain the situation to these folks. “Uh,” I said. Hm. What to say? “Er…”
I didn’t know WHAT to say.
My dearest solved the problem by bursting into hysterical laughter.
I tried to keep a straight face, failed immediately, and fell into hysterical laughter, too. We collapsed in the car seats, cackling like loons.
Some twenty people stood there and stared at us for a second. The more cautious among them quickly loaded their vehicles and got the hell out; after all, it didn’t pay to hang around with crazy unpredictable people like this. Who knew when they might quit laughing and suddenly start trying to kill each other again? Or any inconvenient staring bystanders? Best to quietly hustle away…
It was a fun idea. I doubt we would have gotten the free dinner cards, once all was said and done, though…
I’ve been in that hot seat a few times. I’ve never opened my checkbook either.