Yes, Vacuum Salesmen Still Exist at 10:23 AM

I was hoping I’d have something good for my hundredth post, so this happened just at the right time.  Get comfortable…it’s story time.  

It’s been a while since my last good story, so let me fill you in on a little something that happened last night at the house.  I got off of work at 8:00 in the evening, and planned on enjoying a few hours with my wife before going to bed and getting up at 5:00 to go back to work.  Such is life when it’s my Saturday to work.  Around 9:00, there was a knock at the door.  I thought surely this must be someone we knew to be coming by so late.  Alas, I was wrong.  It was people selling vacuums.  You’re probably thinking, “Who sells vacuums at 9:00?  You didn’t let them in, did you?”  Well, the folks at Kirby sell vacuums at 9:00, and I did in fact let them in.  I will give you my reasoning.  There was a girl and a guy at who came to the door, and the girl was apparently working to have her college tuition paid for by Kirby.  I’m not exactly sure how that worked, but whatever.  They told me that they’d demonstrate this vacuum on my living room carpet and get some spots up with the shampoo attachment that comes with the vacuum.  So I figure they’re going to shampoo my carpet, show me how much my present vacuum sucks (ha!) and give me a sales pitch.  So basically I get a free carpet cleaning for sitting through this thing.  I figured the whole thing including the cleaning wouldn’t take more than an hour.  It was freaking 9:00, right?

Wrong.  I found out when they came in that first of all, they didn’t even have the vacuum with them to begin with.  Apparently this sales office is based out of Indy, and they take a van full of salespeople to different cities every now and then to go door-to-door.  Well the vacuums were in the van, which was currently in another neighborhood.  So we sat awkwardly and waited for the van to show up with the vacuum.  Now, I don’t have a problem with door-to-door sales in principle.  I figured selling vacuums in such a manner was a thing of the past, where the guy comes in and dumps a whole bunch of crap on your floor and then cleans it up or something.  But if you’re doing this, shouldn’t you kind of have the product with you so you’re not wasting people’s time?  But I digress.

The vacuum people showed up after about 15 minutes, at which point the girl left.  I’m not sure what exactly she was doing to earn college tuition other than keeping the actual salesman company, but having her there certainly didn’t influence my decision to let them in one way or another.  So anyway, the guy started his pitch, and first he had me vacuum the room up a bit with our present vacuum.  Then he proceeded to show us all 4,328 attachments for his machine and what they do.  There was pretty much a tool for everything, but I’ll spare you the details.  Let’s just say it’s a pretty nice machine.  Then he went and vacuumed the carpet with his little white pad that caught what he was sucking up, and he showed us how much our vacuum was leaving behind underneath what it was picking up.  Of course, we already knew this to some extent, as we’ve had our current vacuum for 5 years and sometimes it smells like burning.  

There came a point where he was about to do another demonstration, and my wife just told him in not so many words, “Yeah, we understand it’s great and everything.  How much does it cost?”  I should say at this point that I knew we weren’t going to be buying one of these things.  He told us earlier that Kirby doesn’t do any sort of advertising, and that all their machines are sold like this, from door to door.  Also he said that Kirby wasn’t “built to a price, but it’s built to a standard”, which means, “It’s really freaking expensive”.  So at that point, I was ready for him to clean my carpet and leave, because this whole purchasing thing just wasn’t happening.

So after she told him to get on with the price side of things, he started into his spiel.  He told us how we’d never have to buy another vacuum, it’s got a lifetime guarantee, etc, etc.  Any guesses as to the cost?  Anyone?  It blew Dyson’s $600 out of the water with a whopping $1990.00.  Yeah, that’s why they don’t tell you how much it costs first.  And since the first price they give you is never the real price, after we laughed at him he took it down to about $1668.00.  This was obviously still more than we could afford, so I told him we just weren’t going to do it.  Of course, he persisted and went through the always hilarious “Let me call my supervisor and see what we can do for you”.  It was made even more hilarious by the fact that he’d forgotten his cell phone in the van and needed to use our phone…to call long distance.  So that was a good sales tactic.  This went on for longer than it should have, and I probably should have just told him to get out, but he hadn’t shampooed my freaking carpet yet!

Finally the whole purchasing ordeal came to an end when the supervisor himself (who looked like the mob boss of vacuum salesmen with the unbuttoned shirt and a wife beater underneath, accompanied by a gold chain and a thatch of chest hair coming out of the shirt) put in an appearance and made his best offer.  We refuted it, and I could see his frustration, and I wanted to be like, “Is this really uncommon that people don’t buy a ridiculously expensive vacuum cleaner?”  I mean it’s great and all, but who can afford that?  Sure, it’s the last vacuum you’d ever have to buy, but even if I could afford it, I don’t make $1500, or even $500 decisions on the spot.  The wife and I have a policy that we take a day to think about all large purchases to make sure we don’t get caught up in the sales pitch and the excitement of having a new toy.  And man, those salesmen hate it when we tell them that.  It’s actually pretty hilarious.  They go through their whole deal and we tell themt, and they get all indignant and say the price offer won’t be good tomorrow, which we all know is a bunch of crap.  

Anyway, after all this, they guy finally cleaned some spots out of the carpet.  We’d been talking about getting the carpet cleaned since we moved in, so that’s the whole reason I let these guys in in the first place.  Here was the kicker though.  My wife answered the door before I talked to these people, and they told her three lies:  

-They would not try to sell us anything (which we knew was BS, but we forgave it)

-The shampooing would not get the carpet wet (which was intriguing, and also untrue)

-They would get all the spots out of the carpet in that room (which changed once they found out we weren’t going to buy it)

Oh, and did I mention how long they were there?  Two hours!   So the whole thing didn’t end up being over until 11:00.  If I’d known how long it was going to take in advance, I would have turned them away.  Who goes from door to door at 9:00 on a Friday night knowing that their presentation takes two hours?  

So the moral of the story is this:  if you’ve got the money and you really want your house to be clean, buy a Kirby.  It’s a great machine.  Just don’t sit through two hours of a presentation on a Friday night expecting to get your carpet cleaned.  If these guys come to your door, only let them in if you plan on buying something.  Because otherwise it’s pretty much a waste of time.   Especially if you have to get up for work six hours after they leave.