Anyway, I knew about the Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, LDS and the desperate kids with magazine sales....but this takes the cake!
Curious if I need to resort to the "stinking drunk maniac husband" routine to get them out before bedtime tonight, or if I should just stay sequestered away here and let my wife continue to baffle them with crazy talk until they realize we're not exactly going to shell out any money (I hope...)
UPDATE: they left around 10 PM. Holy crap. The "manager" of the duo finally caught on that I was no newb to sales tactics. Entertaining talk about his life as a drug dealer before he got Jesus and reformed, becoming a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Fascinating....not sure if I had somehow managed to turn the conversation around to where he was divulging his life's story, or if it was his last ditch "honesty about bad boy turned good in the name of Jesus" ploy at closing the deal...but they did, finally, pack up and get out.
This was a high price in personal time to pay for a clean living room carpet. Not as high a price as they paid for no closed sale after three hours. I sort of felt like career councelling them about making better time/earning ratio choices in employment.....then again, maybe the door-to-door vacuum sales business is just booming, and they simply had the misfortune to choose the house with two eclectic loons instead of the one next door with a kindly old lady, a chihuahua and a desperate need to deal with dog hair.
My wife does want one of these things though....!!!
Be careful. There was a group of 'vacuum salesmen' in my area who were in fact casing joints and robbing them if no one was at the house when they called. They were finally caught when a neighbor reported them to the police, but not until after damaging property and stealing stuff for 2 weeks.
ReplyDeleteNoted! I had talked to my wife about the problem with this sort of thing, because when I found out a door-to-door salesman had come by that was the first thing I thought of. This group may be legit in the sense that they're actually working for Kirby, but at the same time they're part of a traveling crew that moves from city to city, hitting each area for six weeks of sales saturation at a time...not a lot of incentive not to take advantage of houses that might look like an easy mark.
DeleteEither way, I've promised my wife I'll buy her a nice (but considerably cheaper) vacuum clearner as long as she promises not to invite weird salesmen into the house in the future...!
Yeah, the problem isn't that the vacuum cleaner isn't worth the money. It's that there's no conceivable reason to spend that much on any vacuum cleaner for a household residence.
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