Uh… At Least You Got Paid?

At the age of eighteen, when I moved away from home, I learned the value of researching a business before accepting a job offer — unfortunately at the expense of many other unwitting victims.

This took place in the late 1990s when PCs cost as much as low-end cars and most people didn’t have the Internet at home.

I answered an advertisement in a newspaper looking for commission-based salesmen to sell credit card processing services and equipment to businesses. As soon as I read, “No cold calling or door-to-door sales,” I grabbed my phone.

At face value, it seemed like a legit business. They had a large, luxurious suite with several offices and departments inside. The sales team leader gave a lengthy, thorough presentation introducing the company, giving individual interviews, and hiring a select few from the large group that showed up. And most importantly, I wasn’t required to purchase any sales kit or pay any money.

Sales leads were generated from typical means of advertisements as well as from a call center that telemarketed for the company. My only responsibility was to show up to each appointment and make the sale. Although our team leader strongly encouraged us to use pressure tactics, my own conscience held me back from that, and I simply used persuasion tactics that landed me sales from business owners who were genuinely interested.

I quickly accelerated at a pace to where I felt like a superstar; I was handing in more signed contracts faster than they could get someone out there to help set up the equipment!

What happened next was almost like the ending scene out of a bad movie. In the middle of the night over the weekend, I was up playing video games when I heard the flap to my mailbox slam shut, followed by a car pulling out of my driveway and leaving. I looked in my mailbox to find a paycheck from the company for nearly twice the amount I was expecting to get with a sticky note saying, “Thanks a bunch! Good luck!”

I remember getting this uneasy, eerie feeling that so many things were just off about this. And it turned out that my intuition was right. I showed up to work that following Monday ready to grab my sales leads and get busy, and I beheld the suite… completely empty and stripped to the bare walls, and a group of equally confused fellow salespeople standing in the middle of the forlorn room with “WTF?!” written over their faces.

Although we were all clearly out of work, none of us could really get that angry because we had all been given enormous paychecks that — for me, at least — definitely would hold us over for a couple of months while we looked for work.

A couple of weeks later, I casually strolled into a restaurant that I had sold a system and contract to, merely intending to have lunch. The owner noticed me and gave me a look like I had stolen her mother’s life savings.

Owner: *Charging up to me* “You f***ed up bad showing your face here! BARRY! GET OUT HERE NOW! BARRY! [Employee], go get Barry!”

I wasn’t about to find out who “Barry” was and what they were about to do to me. I bolted out of the restaurant.

That evening, I got on the Internet at a library and looked up the name of my now former employer. They were a real business, all right, but my search turned up dozens upon dozens of irate merchants all over the country. As it turned out, all of the lines we were told to use during our sales training were either outright lies or highly misleading.

The four-year “contracts” they had me selling turned out to be very slickly worded LEASES that couldn’t be cancelled. The $199 “cancellation fee,” if you took the time to read the fine print and legal mumbo jumbo, was actually the minimum amount a merchant would have to pay to get out of the lease. Adding to the sting was a mass of hidden charges and fees that NONE of us were told about, resulting in the merchants paying much more than we had said they would. In each instance, the company would set up shop in a major city, aggressively sell to as many merchants as they could, pay their salespeople a single large check (either as “hush money” or to eliminate the chances of anyone disputing the amount they should have gotten), and then disappear literally overnight before the word about them got out.

In absolute horror and shame at what I had inadvertently done, I ended up writing letters of apology to everyone I could think of that I’d ensnared in this mess, and then I moved several hours away to where my dad lived. I’ve since vowed never to work as a commission-based salesman ever again.

Do your homework and read the fine print — whether you are customer or employee!