An Interesting Experience I Never Want to Repeat
My time as a teenage knife salesman
The newspaper ad read:
$13 an hour.
No experience necessary.
The year was 1996. I was a poor college freshman. My plan to focus on school and hang out with friends was derailed by a shocking and sobering reality: living away from home is kind of expensive.
I’d saved up all summer for the fun things college entailed. But after getting outfit with the essentials and the essentially inessential—a PlayStation and a bunch of games—my war chest was looking bare. And it was only October.
It didn’t help that my plan to subsist on dorm food had been derailed by the inedible nature of dorm food.
I started looking for a job.
Nearly 30 years later, $13 an hour doesn’t seem like much. I can promise you, at the time it was unheard of. My first job bagging groceries started at $4.25. I worked there 3 years. When I quit before college, I was making $5.50 (I think). $13 was a king’s ransom.
It was too good to be true. I was too greedy to see it.
I called the number. The woman was friendly but evasive. She asked a few basic questions and gave me a time and a location. I now realize this sounds like a drug deal or cult initiation. And in a way, it ended up being both. But I was too blinded by dollar signs to pay attention to a little old worm of doubt.
I went.
Part 1: Initiation
The location was about an hour away, in a city I’d never been to. I borrowed my girlfriend’s car because I was without.
I checked in with the receptionist and filled out some paperwork. There were other people in the waiting room. My competition, I guessed. I still had no idea what the job entailed.
She gave me a name tag and told me to find a seat in the next room. There were already about 20 people inside; what kind of interview was this? The best seats—the ones in back—were taken. I found one in the front third and settled in to wait.
The chairs were all facing the same direction, like at a conference. If you’ve seen The Office, picture the part where Andy hosts a free business seminar, with the goal of upselling the attendees. It was like that—larger, less ridiculous, and likewise filled with hopeful rubes. It’s all so obvious in retrospect but, again, I was young and stupid.
A mid-20s guy emerged from a door at the front of the room. He was very enthusiastic. I don’t think he did the call-and-response thing with the audience, the kind where you’re badgered into expressing excitement you may or may not feel, but he was definitely the type. Today he’d absolutely be a hustle bro.
He began by talking about all the money we could make. All the money he had made. How he was his own boss. Set his own hours. And how this miracle of miracles could be attained by all of us, if we were willing to work for it.
Nobody likes to be accused of being lazy, even if it’s true. Besides, $13/hour.
He then exposed us to the previously unknown world of high end cutlery. Exposed being the operative word. A tablecloth was dramatically thrown back, like this was a magic trick: Watch as I turn these ordinary kitchen utensils into fat stacks.
At the time, the extent of my culinary prowess began and ended at pasta. But even I could see the allure of these knives. It was self-evident. I’d never heard of Cutco before, but I took that to be a personal failing. This wasn’t ‘as seen on TV’ Ginsu garbage. This was legit. He cut a penny in half with a pair of kitchen shears! I didn’t even know you used pennies in the kitchen.
He revealed that $13/hour was the low-end of what we could make. We’d potentially be making many multiples of that. You unlocked higher commissions at certain sales gates, as well as other incentives. The incentives had their own literature, like those school fundraisers that promised a bike if you sold $5000 of World’s Finest Chocolate.
The day ended with him answering questions and talking privately to each attendee for a few minutes. I was enthusiastic to sell myself, as though this was a real interview for a real job. It’s definitely a good thing I’ve never been courted by an actual cult.
Remember in Revenge of the Sith when Palpatine was going full court press on the #benefits of the Dark Side, and stupid Anakin is all agog, and asks if it’s possible for a Jedi to learn such magic? And Palpatine says, lol yeah right bro?
In this scenario, I was Anakin. Although I didn’t ask for tutelage. None of us did. We didn’t have to. He could see it in our eyes.
Knife Bro said, “Come back tomorrow.”
We did.
Well, most of us did. There’d been a few older people in the crowd. That alone made them oddballs. It also conferred a desperation that was practically rank. (Ironic, isn’t it?) None of them returned for the 2nd day of what would be a 3-day commitment. I noted their absence smugly. They couldn’t hack it.
Day two began with a closer examination of the wares. Knife Bro went over all the merch in great detail. He then shared the fine art of selling something to someone who didn’t ask for it and may not want it. The trick: they just don’t realize they want it yet. It’s the Biff Tannen approach to sales.
Materials were distributed. There would be homework. There was an actual script to memorize. Still, $13/hour. Minimum.
That hourly rate didn’t include the 9 hours this entire song and dance ended up taking, for which I received nothing but foolish optimism. In fact, I paid for the privilege.
Day two concluded with him telling us to bring $79 tomorrow. We needed to purchase our own sales kits—an oddball assortment of knives and utensils to demonstrate the superiority of our product and thereby close deals. It was a surprise, but merely a speed bump. I was in too deep to realize how deep I was.
It was all the money I had. It was an investment.
The third and final day was spent practicing with our newly-formed sales muscles. We paired off and took turns running through the script. My first partner was an awkward kid with acne who made me feel like a sales god. My second partner was a blonde girl with strong ‘what-if’ energy. She acted as though she didn’t care, but her continued presence indicated she very much did.
Knife Bro took over again and shared how we could grow our pie further by recruiting new salespeople to the cause. We’d earn a percentage on any sales they made. That, he confided, unironically, is where the real money was made.
There’s a term for this. I didn’t know it yet.
And then we were turned loose on an unsuspecting world, secure in its ignorance of cutlery.