Our neighborhood is waaay too close to a freeway, so we are victims of waaay too many door-to-door sales efforts.
~ Door-to-door, izzat Direct Marketing? ~
As a response to these attacks, many years ago, I disconnected our doorbell. The usual sales type waddles up to our door, thinks he has rung the bell and goes away.
On one steamy summer evening, however, an apparently clumsy guy knocked. He knocked on my bell-less door!
He really didn’t mean to knock.
He was selling ladders and dropped his sample which bounced on the porch and bumped the door, thereby waking me from my usual pre-bedtime nap in front of the Teevy ~ tuned, of course to the classy World Wrestling Federation.
The sample was an exceptionally heavy aluminum ladder that could be configured about 27 different ways, depending on whether you had to paint a steeple or a car port.
Since our house has neither a steeple nor a car port, and definitely not a carport with a steeple, I politely declined his kind offer and referred him to the building contractor down the street.
Later I decided that if I were facing the marketing problem of selling that ladder, I would instruct my salesmen to approach each house by deliberately clatterfying the ladder on everybody’s porch.
I wonder …
Joe McTaggart
Self-Described Headhunter
San Jose, CA
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