I’m guessing that the profession of travelling salesmen died out shortly after the popularization of television advertizing. But the profession lives on mostly in sitcoms. Dan’s father (on Roseanne) was a TS but I can’t recall what he sold during his travels.
I remember seeing some older shows from the 60’s where the vacuum cleaner salesman showing up at the front door was a popular recurring add-in. Did salesmen really drive from city to city with an inventory of vacuum cleaners in the back of their wood panelled station wagons? That must have been a miserable profession.
What else did travelling salesmen sell? How far did they typically drive while looking for a sale?
AFAIK travelling salesmen traveled with their sample case, took orders and then the stock would be shipped later. Ref The Music Man, among others. No way Professor Harold Hill could travel with uniforms, instruments, sheet music, etc.
I believe some of them also sold encyclopedias. My aunt and uncle bought a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica from such a salesman in the mid 1970s. As far as I can remember he brought a couple of sample volumes to the house, and probably some brochures and stuff.
It wasn’t a cold call, he had made an appointment with them because they were interested in buying.
Pre-Sears mailorder catalogs, they sold everything.
And they were often called peddlers.
There were no local department stores; there was no internet.
And out in the boonies, the store had to come to you. At vastly inflated prices. Which is part of the reason farm folks were poor, & the city had dough.
Vacuum cleaners and envelopes were the cliched ones although very real. I hear the vacuum cleaner showmanship could be very good especially when the salesman dumped a load of crap on your floor and told you to get your own to see who can clean it up the fastest. The only door to door salespeople that I have encountered these days besides hoodlum girl scouts and school children sell magazine subscriptions which the pitch consists of lies (college scholarships or something) but the product is real and you generally get what you order.
Are you talking about traveling salesmen or door-to-door salesmen? Very different things. Traveling salesmen are like the guys in Tommy Boy, while the door-to-door guys push encylopediae, Fuller Brushes, and so on.
Anyone know what it was that Willy Loman supposedly sold?
Travelling salesmen often carried miniatures of their products to show large products to customers on the road. Here are some examples of furniture samples.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, and we still got milk delivered to our home by a guy in a truck, we had salesmen come by regularly selling Fuller brushes, potato chips in big 2 lb. cans, and bread.
The bread man came by weekly. The chip guy came weekly in the summer only. The Fuller brush man I only remember seeing a few times. The Electrolux vacuum cleaner guy came by, too, and I think my parents bought one, because we had an Electrolux for many years.
My mom bought a set of Journeys Through Bookland, an encyclopedia-sized set of children’s books that was basically a survey course of children’s English lit. That was from a door-to-door salesman. My dad was pissed, but we got twenty years’ worth of book reports from those.
There’s a very decent documentary called Salesman which deals with the day to day life of door to door bible salesmen. The job seems to be every bit as miserable as you’d imagine it.
Heh, what’s with the A&W root beer in every shot? I mean, I’m sure they had some kind of joint advertising deal with whoever was selling the furniture, but that’s just such a bizarre pairing.
Buy this fabulous mahogany dresser now, and get a 2-liter of refreshing A&W root beer absolutely FREE!
ETA: Duh, it’s gotta be there to show the size of the model. I’m a little slow today.
