“Can I ask you a couple of crazy questions?”

The other day, I related a story about how I was almost sucked into a multi-level marketing scheme.  There were several reasons why I didn’t want to get involved in that kind of stuff.

Not the least of which was – a few years earlier, I actually participated in one of those programs.

Background.

It was the autumn of 1985.  I had just graduated from college, returned home to Albany, and gotten a small apartment on South Lake Avenue – a three-story walk-up with a fire escape out my front window.  Sometimes, on hot September evenings, I would climb out on the fire escape and stare into the sky, watching the stars twinkle in the heavens.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my post-college job “down-sized” – they reduced their staff by one person, guess which one person they let go – and I didn’t have a backup plan.

Undaunted, I bought a copy of the Times Union and looked through the hiring ads.  I found nothing.  Virtually nothing.

At that point, I got desperate.

Which was when I saw the advertisement for a company called American Wholesale.

American Wholesale, with an office in a Railroad Avenue warehouse, had several products available for purchase – pots and pans, furniture, gold chains, etc. – and if you could sell these items, you could make money.  And if you found people who could sell these items for you, you could make money off of them.

And yes, I was so financially screwed up and desperate, that I took the job.

And thus began my one-week run with American Wholesale.

And it was ten days too long, as far as I was concerned.

Every morning, you were required to be at the American Wholesale front office on Railroad Avenue by 7:00 a.m.  There was a training session and a pep rally chant, to get everyone motivated to go out and sell sell sell sell.

Of course, what they DIDN’T tell you was that the stuff you were selling was pure and complete junk.  The gold chains were gold-plated – probably barely gold-colored.  The pots and pans were fine as long as you never applied any sort of heat to them.  And the furniture was about as fragile as it was ugly.

And you were expected to sell it – door to door, like a traveling salesman.  But you couldn’t sell it house to house – that would make you a peddler and you would need a license to do so in the Capital District.

But you could try to sell it to businesses and organizations, and if they bought the stuff, that was okay.  And if you sold enough things, when you got back the owners of American Wholesale would ring a bell and give you congratulations.  And you would also receive a cut of what you sold.

On the first day, I went out on a sales run with another person who had been with American Wholesale for about three months.  He gave me a pouch full of those faux gold chains, and told me I needed to learn how to sell them.  With that, he went into a business – I think it was an ice cream shoppe – and asked one of the counter people, “Hey there, can I ask you a couple of crazy questions?”

That got the counter person’s attention.

“Do you like wearing gold?”

The person was hooked.

At this point, the trainer pulled a chain out of my bag, showed the counter person the special “custom-built” latch on the chain that guaranteed it would never break or come apart, and within five minutes the counter person bought a chain.

Amazing.

“Okay, now you try it,” he said to me, pointing me in the direction of another store.

It was a pharmacy.

I walked in and went up to the pharmacist, who was filling out a prescription.

“Scuse me,” I said, “Can I ask you a couple of crazy questions?”

The pharmacist looked up.  “If you’re not buying anything, leave,” he said.  “We don’t allow solicitors here.”

Immediately realizing that “solicitation” meant “selling jewelry in a pharmacy,” I quickly left.

Five hours later, the total amount of gold chains sold by me on the first day was zero.  Nil. Zilch. Nada.

The next day, all the sales people were offered a challenge.  If you didn’t sell something, try to at least get a ball-point pen from the store.

Fair enough.

I went out on the CDTA and rode to Schenectady.  Oh, did I mention that it was about 5 degrees below zero and the wind was blowing like crazy, and that I needed to sell these cheapo fake gold chains that had less karats in them than in a steak salad – and that, with only a dollar in my pocket, I either had to sell these chains to at least eat lunch, or go without food for the day?

Somehow a liberal arts college education should have prepared me for this.

Still, I went all the way up and down State Street, from Mohawk Mall all the way to Proctor’s and back, stopping at every business location I could, half the time to get warm, half the time to try to sell the gold chains, and nearly every time poaching a ballpoint pen from the store or business.

By the time I somehow got back to Railroad Avenue (selling no chains and only surviving on the kindness of a fish fry store who took pity on my hungry self and gave me a fish fry and a soda on the house), I had again failed in selling even a single gold chain.  And to top it all off, although I had filled my pockets with ballpoint pens, garnering about 40 of the little ink-filled styli, I suddenly discovered that at least 20 of those pens – with a combination of cold outdoor temperatures and warm pocket temperatures – leaked.  Leaked big time.  Pen explosions, in all sorts of blues and blacks, all over my jean pockets – my jeans – and my legs.  Argh.

I spent at least five more days traipsing around the Capital District, trying to ask every shop and store owner “a couple of crazy questions,” not the least of which was why in the name of the Lord above was I trying to sell these crapola chains to anybody?

I gave it a week.  Then I told the people at American Wholesale that I was quitting.

They told me I was a terrible salesman and that every other person in their organization had met their sales quota, and that I just didn’t try hard enough.

So it was a mutual parting of the ways.  They kicked my rear out the door, and I gave them a couple of birdies as I left.

Essentially my experience with American Wholesale soured me on any sort of door-to-door sales or marketing schemes.  It also cut into my trust with any marketed product that didn’t come from a store or from a reputable online seller.

Over time, I had to ask myself a couple of crazy questions.  Why did I ever let myself get involved in American Wholesale?

Answer: I was young and stupid and desperate for a job.  I made a mistake.

Another crazy question: Did I learn from that mistake?

Answer: More than you would ever imagine.