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Do these look familiar?

CUSTOMER SERVICE Summer Openings $12.50 base/appt. No experience will train Customer sales/service. Conditions apply. CALL 434-0201

ENTRY LEVEL Summer Openings Great Pay Long & short term available! Customer sales & service, No experience needed. Conditions apply, start now. To interview 434-0201

If you work in a college town they probably do. they are for a company called Vector marketing. There are many other businesses under Vector like Alcas and so on.

Vector marketing sells knives on behalf of Cutco a American knife company trying to compete with overseas high end knifes.

I am not here thought to talk about the knives or Cutco but about Vector. Last summer I had a very important college internship and I needed a flexible job to sustain me. The Vector advertisement sounded great, no one else was offering me that much money so I took the plunge.

Over the phone with a "secretary" I was told that the job payed by appointments to customers and that the appointments were preset. She then set up an interview with the manager.

The building seemed very empty for a business to me almost like a A-team scam hardly any art work or furniture that was not built to travel. There were four other people interviewing with me. The interview now as I look back seemed very superficial with talk only about me and my interests but I managed to get in a question. "Will I be making calls or setting up appointments because I am not comfortable with that?", I asked. He simply said no all appointments were preset. I was encouraged about the job so i stayed for a two hour demonstration about the product. He then set up the next appointment for the beginning of a two day unpaid training course.

The training course started out fine but there was some jargon and phrasing thrown around that made me weary but at the end of the first day we were told to go home and write down as many Names and numbers of people we knew as possible this was to be a memory exercise.

The next day he had us count how many we had come up with. The one with most names got to sit in the most comfortable chair for the rest of the ten hour training. This is where my clash with the trainer began. I sat quietly as the trainer left the room and motioned to the young marine that maybe he should give up his comfortable chair to the seventy something old lady. The young marine gave the older woman the chair. then the sales rep came back and wanted to know why the older woman had the chair. I answered that she was tired from the ten hours of training from the day before. the training rep then got upset and insisted that the young man had the chair because the old lady did noy try hard enough and did not deserve the chair. He then asked us to turn in our lists of names and numbers and i declined explaining that I only met him and was uncomfortable giving him my loved ones information. After I spoke up another girl declined her list the training rep was not happy with me and after that he did not let me get in a word in for the rest of the day.
He photocopied the other's lists and returned them to the trainees. We were then advised to break the list into groups according to their income and social status.

H = Home
M = Married
3 = Over 30 years of age.

A HM3 were the people we were to set up our first interviews with. The goal was to sell $10,000 worth of product in a week. This he called the fast track. He than told us trade tricks like using our social and economical status to sell products. We were never to change from saying that we were poor college kids and this was our first sale. This would help us sell a homemaker a $1000 set of knives to your family and friends and after making that sale you will pressure them for more HM3's to call to set up appointments.

What Vector marketing is doing is not Illegal but unethical and the worst part is, is that it starts a whole other generation of unethical business people ready to lie to there own family and friends in order to make money as fast as possible no matter who they hurt.