There are many things you shouldn’t sell door-to-door. Two that come quickly to mind are vacuum cleaners and religion.
I’m not so sure if anyone sells vacuum cleaners out of their trunk these days. My guess is there’s no market for it. That niche has been gobbled up by big box stores, the internet and infomercials that convince you if your vacuum can’t suck up a bowling ball it’s just not doing its job. I’ll admit that with a husband, a child and a dog I often suck up some significantly-sized debris but I can’t say I’ve ever discovered bowling balls or their equivalent in weight and size just lying around. The day that happens is the day I need to take a serious look at my housekeeping methods.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I have any of these laying around, waiting to be vacuumed up.
If I recall, my mom bought her Kirby from a trunk, so to speak, along with Avon products, Salad Master pots and pans and those evil, pyramid scheming Amway products that even back then probably subliminally communicated some whacky religious messages when you used them.
Even the school sales have slowed down these days, with schools strongly discouraging kids from asking people they don’t know if they’d like to buy candy, wrapping paper, cookie dough, magazines…I could keep going. Instead, they encourage kids to collect their orders online and contact those long lost, rich relatives spread across the country and provide them an easy opportunity to order at their leisure and give your little Betty or Billy credit in the process.
That’s a good trend. I’m all for nixing the whole door-to-door thing completely, But, there’s one little thing that for some reason a few people still think going door to door is the way to sell it, and that “it” is religion.
As a kid, we lived in an area that was ripe for religious sales, or at least they thought. I grew up in a fairly rural part of the country, lived about a mile out of town and up off a highway. You had to make a concerted effort to come to our house, but religion has no bounds. And those Jehovah Witness folks just kept on coming. I guess there were enough of them that they could rotate and share in the rejections, because they never stopped trying, even though the answer was the same every time, with slight colorful variations depending on the family responder.
W e were never a religious family, but Jehovah Witnesses are about as far from my beliefs as humanly possible. No holidays. No birthdays. No enjoying the weekends. No jewelry. No music. No movies. No fun. And for what, to get ready for the Second Coming, which I really have no idea if that’s bad or good, but it doesn’t matter because the only thing that’s coming in my book is something tangible like the ice cream truck or a snow storm.
Selling religion door to door feels about as passé as selling vacuums. But, two young men approached our door recently and I politely said I wasn’t interested. I really wanted to scream, ‘Stop with the God sale, go out and have some fun, enjoy life. Quit hawking goods that 99.99 percent of us have no interest in buying.’
That may sound harsh, but I’m a realist. I don’t need a vacuum that picks up bowling balls and I don’t need my soul saved by a pimply-faced teen. Case Door closed.
