Knock Knock

Back when I was growing up, an opportunity to be a door-to-door sales child manifested itself every fall, shortly after the school year began.

A man named Mr. Barnett would show up at our school, the guest speaker for an all-student assembly.

Mr. Barnett - who, the nuns assured us (and, by extension, our parents), was a good Catholic family man who made his living by getting Catholic school kids to go door-to-door selling subscriptions to good, wholesome magazines like Catholic Digest. The nuns liked it because they got to collect some of the take and direct it towards the missions, where it was definitely put to good use. E.g., baptizing a pagan baby which, as I recall, cost $5. The kids liked the idea of selling because they could earn swell prizes. And Mr. Barnett liked it for obvious reasons.

Even at a young age, we all understood Mr. Barnett's angle, and the afternoon after his presentation, our annual chant would break out in the patrol line on the way home:

The more you buy, the more I get

That is the slogan of Mr. Barnett

Make fun we did, but we also wanted to win swell prizes. Even the worst one - for selling a single subscription to Catholic Digest - earned you a Hershey Bar. 

After Mr. B's preso, we'd head back to our classrooms, where the nuns would hand out the glossy brochures showing all the magazines for sale, and the simple to fill out sign-up sheets.

Go forth and sell, junior salesmen!

Trouble was, my parents wouldn't let us go door-to-door selling magazines.

They rightly pointed out that, since pretty much every house on our block had kids who went to Our Lady of the Angels, there was no one to sell anything to. And they weren't going to let us both our grandmother, our Uncle Charlie, or our Aunt Margaret, let alone pester the larger part of our family, all those aunts, uncles, and cousins a thousand miles away in Chicago. Our Chicago grandmother, who surely needed to improve her English by subscribing to more better magazines. Grandma was off-limits. Incur the cost of a long distance phone call to try to sell her? Preposterous!

Of course, Chicago would have been the territory of our Dineen cousins - a family, like ours, with five kids: three girls, two boys. Surely, there was a Midwest version of Mr. Barnett who was revving the students of St. Bede's Elementary to go out and flog subscriptions.

Most families were, of course, in the same situation as ours. Who do you sell to when everyone in the 'hood has kids selling magazines? But these other families either let their kids sell to family members outside the parish, or they relented and bought one subscription for each of their kids so they'd have something to report back to their classroom's nun.

My parents did buy one subscription per year - good old Catholic Digest - but they rotated kids.

In fifth grade, it wasn't my turn. (No Hershey Bar for you, girlfriend.)

Unfortunately, in fifth grade, we had an especially vicious nun who was hell bent on getting 100% Barnett sales participation from her classroom.

At one point, my friend Bernadette and I were the only holdouts among the nearly 50 kids in our class.

Sister Saint Wilhelmina didn't like us to begin with. (Long story, but she was the absolute worst nun I ever encountered. And I encountered some pretty terrible nuns over the years.) Not selling magazines didn't help us. 

One afternoon, Willie decided to whip the classroom into a go-go sales froth. "There are two girls who aren't selling," she screeched. "What should we do with them?"

I remember Billy Mullin leaping out of his chair, turning to confront me, and, his face contorted, hollering, "Lynch 'em!" to the cheers of my classmates.

(Parochial school in the postwar "Golden Age of American Catholic Triumphalism" was no place for the faint of heart.)

Eventually, Bernadette's Aunt Anna bought a subscription from her. (Probably Catholic Digest.) She was a very kind woman, who doted on Bernadette, and probably would have bought a subscription from me, if I'd asked her.)

Honestly, I don't suffer from PPSSD (Post-Parochial School Stress Disorder), but a recent article in The New Yorker did dredge up memories of my non-experience as a door to door sales child. (I did knock on doors for The Heart Fund a couple of times. My mother would sign up to take care of our street and would dispatch me and/or my sister Kath to collect for her. As I recall, Heart Fund collections took place in February, and the weather was always miserable. Anyway, my mother was tied up with the baby or making dinner, so she dispatched her minions. I don't imagine we collected all that much. It's not like our neighborhood was well to do. And I believe my entire sales pitch was "my mother's collecting for the Heart Fund.")

The New Yorker story is focused on one Sam Taggart, a D2D (that's door-to-door, in current speak) guru who runs an annual conference dedicated to the art and science of door-to-door salesmanship.

Having grown up in the era of the Fuller Brush man, I was familiar with this form of sales. 

The Fuller Brush man paid an annual call on our house, and my mother always bought a brush or two from him - hairbrush, clothes brush, scrub brush, and I think we had a Fuller carpet sweeper. I looked forward to his visits, as he always gave my mother a couple of tiny vials of lilac toilet water, which Kath and I used as perfume when we played grown up lady. We especially got a kick out of something as gorgeously fragrant as lilac toilet water could be called toilet water. 

I can still conjure up the lilac smell. It may well be one of my Proustian madeleine moments.

I would have thought by now that the door-to-door salesman was pretty much a thing of the past, gone the way of the record player, the blunderbuss, thanks to online and Mary Kay-style house party multi-level marketing schemes.

Oh, every winter there's an article about scam artist roofers who con someone into a bad roof repair by knocking on their door and telling the homeowner that they were driving by and spotted a problem, but living in the city, I don't tend to encounter them. The only people who've ever rung my bell are volunteers for political candidates, kids from MassPIRG (Public Interest Research Group), and - once - a couple of Mormon missionaries who were definitely barking up the wrong tree.

Turns out that ex-Mormon missionaries are among the biggest success stories in the D2D world. Having spent two years away from home, knocking on doors - mostly to be turned down - and only occasionally scoring a win with a conversion, they're very well prepared for the world of selling solar panels, pest control, and alarm systems, which are among the products and services that are being sold D2D. 

Salt Lake is the home of modern door-to-door, in large part because it’s the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bryce Roberts, a local venture capitalist, told me, “You’ve got seventy thousand kids going out every year for their two-year missions and getting trained on knocking doors, dealing with rejection, and selling a very difficult product—Jesus.” As a result, he said, the Salt Lake area has become “the Silicon Valley of direct sales and multilevel marketing”—sometimes known as pyramid schemes.

Hmmmm. I'd argue that Jesus actually shouldn't be a very difficult product. Selling Mormonism - or any religion, for that matter - is another story.  

The best door-to-door salesmen can earn more than a million dollars a year, but it’s a punishing way of life. Unlike the salesman who hawks minivans or enterprise software, the door knocker can’t network at the Rotary Club, make a catchy commercial, or research his prospect’s needs. He faces an unknown and often hostile customer with only his own brain for backup.

To help D2D-ers succeed, there are a number of outfits like Taggart's - himself a highly successful salesman - that help others learn the tricks of the trade, through conferences, online learning, videos, books that help sales folks get to that all important 'yes.'

Although I've never sold anything, my career was in marketing, so sales-adjacent. And a few times during the course of my career, I've gone through sales training. Solution Selling was one that I recall. But these were geared toward selling large-scale, expensive systems. Not hawking solar panels D2D. 

In any case, there are a lot of these salesmen, both Mormon and Gentile, out there. 

Industry leaders estimate that between fifty and a hundred thousand knockers go out every summer. The boom was fuelled in part by the advent of the national “Do Not Call” list, in 2003, which dampened phone solicitation, and in part by the very information glut that helped cripple door-to-door in the first place. To deter customers from doing research—to reconstruct the gloriously profitable world of information asymmetry—companies need to catch them unawares. Who among us, when we answer the door, has any inkling of the actual cost of a treatment for ants, roaches, and mice in a three-thousand-square-foot house? Shopping online is about finding the best price; shopping on your doorstep is about being bowled over by someone with all the answers.

Just reading through the concepts used to sell D2D, largely based on psychological manipulation and bull-shittery, raised my hackles. But hopefully, if anyone ever does try to sell me, I'll be prepared to not get bowled over. (Best not to answer the bell to begin with.)

Knock. Knock.

Who's there?

D2D Salesman.

D2D Salesman who?

D2D Salesman selling an alarm system.

Go away.