"We Sell Soap... Not Dope"

We just got a visit from a "door to door" salesman.

He was a young black man in his 20's. He said he was from California, and that their company gets to our area every couple years.

So, his sales line was "We Sell Soap... Not Dope!"

He was very nice, and he showed us how his product works while standing on the doorstep. It works on stains, ballpoint pen ink, soap scum, stove grease etc.

I tested it out and bought some from him because it works really good.

The thing is, his closing line was... "In a couple of years, you'll be visited again by "someone with a permanent suntan."

Huh? I didn't say anything, but him saying that surprised me! In fact, I acted like I didn't hear what he said.

I just can't understand why a person would say that in this day and age. Was it a joke? Was he trying to be funny?

did you buy the soap?

Yes, I bought the soap.

It works really good.

reply to post by sodakota


Maybe the company is minority owned and is proud of the fact that it helps employ black people in the community?

Still, even coming from a black salesman, it comes across as a little too racist...

What does it mean to you? How did you interpret it?

Could of been an inside joke or something like that?

reply to post by sodakota


I've seen these deals for years...they herd young people onto buses, go from town to town, they stay in motels...it's kinda cultish...I have known of a rape and robberies/burglaries as a follow-up...the same deal with the ones selling magazine subscriptions, you know what I'm talking about?






[edit on 11-8-2010 by nine-eyed-eel]

Sounds like the average, black man making a joke about being black.

What's new here?

Do you live in a predominantly non-black middle or upper middle class area?

Because in my old neighborhood, which met the above characteristics, we would yearly get mostly black young men coming through selling highly over-priced magazine subscriptions, and their sales pitch was rather similar.

Not the soap not dope part, but the "if you buy my product I wont turn out to be a criminal" part.

Its just playing to non-black guilt and playing off racial stereotypes. (I say non black guilt rather than "white guilt" because I was in New Mexico, and my neighborhood was a mix of several ethnicities, but virtually no blacks.

IF you buy that most blacks are drug dealers and criminals, THEN it makes sense to you to pay more for a product than it is worth to keep the young man in front of you from becoming a drug dealer or criminal.

Not saying that YOU are prejudiced in this way, but thats what the marketing pitch breaks down to. You obviously felt weird about the pitch, and identified that there was something racist about it, which says a lot for your LACK of prejudice.

I didnt buy their magazines. I didnt want them. And when they would try stuff like "we just want the chance to end up like you someday" I would tell them I started off as a laborer in construction, and that I highly recommended it.

I dont like sales people to begin with, because I hate being manipulated, but I particularly hate salespeople who try to guilt me into buying stuff. I dont "pity buy."

reply to post by nine-eyed-eel


I do. An elderly couple in New Mexico were murdered by two of these magazine guys. And one year, one of them hung out in the neighborhood after dark for some peeping tom activity and got busted up on my neighbors roof looking down into another neighbors window.

www.8newsnow.com...

Two magazine salesmen in Albuquerque are accused of murdering an elderly couple. Now it's been learned the company claims to be based in Las Vegas. The crime highlights a problem both Metro police and the state's attorney general's office have been working on in Nevada.

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


I have run across them in Phoenix and in Las Vegas, in past years...(and in other places that I don't immediately recall, but in Phoenix and in Vegas I wound up hanging out with them)...the last time I hung out with some was 15 years ago, they were white people mostly in the groups I met...

It's been going on for decades, for sure...one of them below-the-radar social phenomena...

reply to post by nine-eyed-eel


you are right i went with a few friends a little over a year ago to do the magazine sales and it was almost like a cult. they herd you four deep into the cheapest motel they can find and if you don't get top 2 sales in your room you got to sleep on the floor. i saw the manager straight punch one of the employees in the face and he didn't do anything. i told my "trainer" if he hit me i would **** him up and he couldn't believe it. he said he would never fight back and why would you even do that. every morning they go outside in a circle and they chant about magazines or something, they tried to make me do it but how could they? basically they get teenagers and young people with no prospects and then they send you off to random parts of the country hundreds of miles from home. they promise you a bus ticket but i know for a fact they abandoned you wherever you were if you decided to quit. i actually saw a guy say he wanted to quit and get assaulted by his boss. once again they didn't do anything, it's like they were brainwashed. you got to get dropped off and stay on foot all day, the hours end up being about 14 a day. and for the first three days they pay you only 20$ daily, which can't even be legal. they also fine you and keep a lot of your money if you are late being picked up. listen don't ever go for this it is a scam and if you don't know how to play their system you will end up broke and stranded hundreds of miles from home.

reply to post by 2weird2live2rare2die


Wow, your direct personal experience is interesting, good post.

I wonder which millionaires are raking in the cash off of this exploitation?

The ones I met in Vegas were staying at the Excalibur (and it was almost new then) and they did have some money to mess around with...

I always think those want-ads that say "DO YOU LIKE ROCK-AND-ROLL?" and similar non-businesslike talk are feeder ads for this stuff, sometimes...

reply to post by nine-eyed-eel


i remember hearing a lot about the top sellers from the company all get to take a trip to vegas and they get a thousand or maybe fifteen hundred dollars to take. i'm not sure but you could have possibly encountered that group.

I don't want door to door sales people I don't care how good the product or how nice the person. I guess I just don't like to be disturbed during my day - hey I'm on ATS, that means I'm busy. If I want something I know where the store is. Sounds kinda mean doesn't it - why take chance on letting a perfect stranger get their foot in my door. I learned this lesson early at around age 10, a man tried to open the door further on me to get in the house - guess my adrenalin kicked in and I got the door closed. It might not have been a good outcome - stay safe people - a lot of cons out there.

Strange that this man said this to you, he should know you wouldn't understand an inside joke if that is what it was.

I think he was referring to
A) a coming nuclear suntan
b) massive solar flares
c) a second sun appearing
or D)He is going to rob a lot of houses and spend a few years in the Bahamas.

Originally posted by nine-eyed-eel
..the last time I hung out with some was 15 years ago, they were white people mostly in the groups I met...

It's been going on for decades, for sure...one of them below-the-radar social phenomena...

I have been reading up on it since this thread. What a messed up bunch
of crap this whole scam is.

Not only do the sales people lie, and use other guilt inducing pitches, (and yes, the two sales men that killed the couple in New Mexico were white too, its all kinds of kids, we just always seemed to get the black ones using the "you dont want me to grow up to be a criminal do you" pitch. I dont know how they decide who goes where.

But anyway, not only are the sales people a little weird, from what I have been reading, the post earlier that talks about abuse of the sales people is not really that uncommon.

If you want to be creeped out, read some of these stories from the sales people.

www.travelingsalescrews.info...

Thanks for the discussion about this, and I sure didn't know anything about the magazine salesmen. Thanks for the "heads up"!

I'm not innocent here though. I asked the hubby to answer the door, because it was a guy, and because I thought it was going to be a JW.

We live in a white community. period. So I guess seeing a young black man in town would raise some eyebrows. Our whole town is like a big "neighborhood watch."

He was on foot, with a backpack, in 96 degree weather.

My thoughts on this is that I didn't think black people "thought" like this anymore. So I'm going to assume it was a joke of sorts.

Door to door salesmen are rare around here. This just reminds me of the Great Depression. Isn't that when door to door salesmen got popular?

Originally posted by nine-eyed-eel
I wonder which millionaires are raking in the cash off of this exploitation?

Well apparently there are a bunch of big dogs running this scam, but some infamous ones are from Texas.

www.travelingsalescrews.info...

In Texas, Robert L. Pennington of Houston's Summit Publishers Service Co., Joseph Edge of Fort Worth's Mecca Enterprises and Mike Furman of San Antonio's Ticoa Corp. became known as the "Texas trio.'' Those men and others connected with their companies hold five of 10 board positions on the National Field Selling Association, the industry's trade group.

The Texas attorney general has received 250 complaints against Summit and 138 against a Mecca subsidiary in the last several years, said spokesman Ron Dusek. The complaints have mostly centered on poor subscription processing, he said, and have simply been referred to the companies for handling.

I did the soap door to door thing a few times when I was a teenager in California. There was nothing very nefarious about it. My friends father was into Amway and he would get a bunch of the neighborhood kids to dress up, load them into vans, and drive us to a different town. We'd sell as much as we could and he'd pay us a little money for it.

I would think this is probably something along those same lines.

there are two kinds of kids who do this job. you got the scared ones who are so nice that everyone buys their magazines because they feel bad for them or feel like they bonded or something, and these are the ones who are almost working against their will and being taken advantage of financially for years. the others are the street type kids who basically sell magazines using very subtle intimidation. they are the ones who likely are on the run, maybe homeless, maybe in and out of corrections, and they can actually be pretty successful since they have no problem scamming innocent people and no place where they really belong anyway. it is a predatory type of environment and the weak are preyed upon, so naturally some will thrive and some will fall through the cracks.

[edit on 11-8-2010 by 2weird2live2rare2die]