On Door to Door Salesmen

I may lose some of you with this post but I had to bring up something that has been bothering me this summer. (When I say lose, I mean that some of you will read this post and say "OMG, me too!" and others will be scratching your heads saying "Uuh, What is he talking about?") Our home and, I suspect, houses throughout neighborhoods everywhere, have been over run by annoying pests this year. No, not mosquitoes, black flies or children. (Though that last one would have been a good guess, especially if you have kept up on my blog.) I am talking about door to door salesmen.

"Door to door salesmen?" I hear you asking yourself. "I thought that they didn't exist anymore." With the exception of the Girl Scouts (or the cookie mafia as my wife refers to them), I always assumed that they had gone extinct as well, like the dodo bird or honest politicians ('tis the season for political jabs). I can't ever remember having a vacuum cleaner or encyclopedia salesman show up at the door plying their wares. Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons have knocked at the door, and I guess they were trying to sell me salvation, but they were not "salesmen" in the strictest sense.

I think telemarketing has gone a long way toward minimizing this particular sales technique. Why pay someone to wander through the neighborhood when you can strap a phone to an employee in an office (usually in India) and make them sell? Not only that, but with the age we live in now, how likely is it that people are going to let strangers into their house? And this works in the opposite direction, as well. I wonder how much insurance the company would have to pay for having their employees going into a stranger's home? There are a lot of crazy people out there! Apparently the trend is coming back, though... well, kind of. I am talking about a particular type of sales technique that has been used on me at least six times so far this summer.

Let me describe the scene to you. You are sitting comfortably in your home, watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory (I love this show, but I swear it is on everytime I turn on TBS. In fact, my wife just turned on TBS as a test, and indeed there it was.) when you hear a knock at the door (or hear a doorbell ring if you live in a fancy house.... well fancier than mine, anyway). You go to answer the door, look out on your stoop and see one or two people standing there. No, they are not Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons; they have on a uniform and are usually holding a clipboard. Nothing says you have an important job to do like a clipboard. Religious groups are usually armed with pamphlets or bibles.

One of the people looks at you and asks "Do you take care of the utility bills in the house?" If you say yes, they will respond with something like "I need to take a look at page 2 of your utility bill to make sure you have selected an energy supplier and to make sure that you are receiving the discounted rate." They never say they are with the electric company but they are very insistent about seeing that bill. The first time this happened to me and before I knew what it was about, I tried to blow the guys off by saying that I didn't keep a paper copy of the bill. I told them that it was kept electronically online. They asked me to get on my computer and pull the information up so they could check it out. They were willing to wait as long as it took, that was how important it was. Just to get rid of them I lied and said I did not have a computer at home. They said they would come back another day and suggested I print out a copy from wherever I had computer access and have it ready. They did come back a few days later, but I made up another excuse.

The sad thing is that there have been at least four different companies who have come to my house to get me to change my energy supplier. According to the pitch, unless I choose a service provider, our utility company (National Grid, in my case) will just willy-nilly pick an energy supplier at random. Our utility company doesn't care if we are getting the cheapest rate, but their company does. My curiosity got the better of me one day -- especially around the time that the second company showed up at my door with the same pitch, so I let one of them in.

The guy hit me with the sales pitch right away. I pulled the bill up on the laptop and had him look it over. He showed me where on the bill it showed how much I was being charged for the fuel delivery (or whatever it was). Then he told me how much they were offering the service for. It was indeed cheaper. The amount of savings was barely a penny. It was based on the amount of energy you used, and I did some quick calculations in my head and I would be saving a whopping 2-3 dollars per bill. It hardly seemed worth the effort these salesmen were putting in and I wondered how much the companies would make off of me. But still, 2-3 dollars off my utility bill was enough for me to sign up (yes, I am that cheap).

Well since I had chosen an energy supplier, I thought I would be all in the clear. I thought wrong. Next time someone showed up at the door I said with a smile on my face: "Sorry, I already went with another company." "Oh no," the guy said to me. "That's okay, we can fix this." The smile left my face. He went on to tell me that they were the only energy supplier that had permission to solicit in our town. According to him I should have called the cops on whoever was trying to get me to switch suppliers. He produced the shabbiest looking form I had ever seen, showed it to me and said it was a permit from the town. I think it said permit on top it and town of Hudson Falls. All the lines of the "form" were hand written and it did not look even a little bit legitimate. It must have been real because it seems like the salesman could get in a lot of trouble if they were called on this and it was proven false. (Maybe Hudson Falls just has terrible forms?) The energy salesman said that all I needed to do was fill out one of their applications and they would take care of the rest. They would get me out of the awful contract that I had mistakenly signed. I just couldn't take it anymore so I told them that it was all right, and that I was actually looking forward to paying more. They begrudgingly left with a bit of an attitude.

I do not mind somebody trying to sell me something. I did telemarketing for almost two years so I understand the game. The guys coming to the house were working off a script that they had been trained to use. It just happens to be a shitty script. The whole thing was such a hard sell that it pissed me off. The fact that these sales guys all insisted that they had to see my energy bill was ridiculous. They HAD to see page two of the bill. They NEEDED to confirm who my energy supplier was. No, they did not need any of these things. This approach is the one that probably had been tested and proven most successful by the people who come up with these sales scripts. The unsuspecting homeowner assumes that the salesmen are there on behalf of National Grid, or whoever their actually utility provider is and let them in. The salesmen go through their spiel, and sign the person up.

I'm not saying that these are scams, and I'm not saying they are not. I looked up the companies on the internet and there were scam indicators all over the place. People were accusing them of all sorts of things, but the biggest thing was the fact that they were so pushy. Others claimed that the savings only lasted for a brief time and that they had trouble contacting people to cancel. Some people even said that they were charged a fee to cancel the service. The guy I talked to addressed all of these issues and that is why I agreed to sign with them. Whether I get proven a sucker remains to be seen, but I will surely let you know if that happens.

As the summer has progressed my wife has suggested that we place a no solicitors sign on the door. I was oppossed to it, because these salesmen have been so pushy I am sure they would just ignore it. My suggestion was to hang a sign in the front yard that says "No, you do not need to see page 2 of my electric bill, now go away." Though that would have said it very succinctly, it certainly lacks style. I am all about style! So to spruce it up a bit, I could steal a little bit from Ben Franklin in his Epic Rap Battle of History versus Billy Mays and say something like "If you ask to see page 2 of my electric bill then call me Arthur Miller, son, because it will be Death of a Salesman." All right that may be a bit over the top, but I bet it would keep those energy pushers away.