Selling to Indians - Part I

Being a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman does not lend itself to political correctness. Unofficially and off the record, our bosses and crew leaders drilled into us the correct profiles of people likely to buy, and of those we shouldn't waste our time with. And a waste of time it was, since if you did a good job of getting in the door (which is a really big part of getting the sale) and spent a good hour or two on the schmooze and the pitch only to get turned down, you've wasted a good part of the night. Ditto if you waste hours knocking on doors in a neighbourhood where nobody will talk to you.

So there were two general demographic profiles that we would focus on in our sales: rednecks and Indians. Today let's discuss the latter.

(Natives, Native Canadians, First Nations. The politically correct term changes from time to time, but the ones I met were happy to call themselves Indians, so I will too. While I don't go too far out of my way to be super-sensitive, it is also not my intention to be wantonly offensive, so I hope you understand my words in the spirit in which they are meant.)

Indians can either live on a reservation, or in a town or city along with white people. Reservations (as far as I could tell, and on the testimony of fellow salesmen) come in two general categories: ones that are obviously poverty-stricken, and ones with a brand new pickup in every driveway. I'm not sure what determines that, but my guess would be the exploitation of some sort of valuable natural resource, such as oil or timber.

As for why Indians are so open to travelling salesmen, I'd be surprised if any research had been done on the topic, but I can give a few educated guesses. First, a characteristic that they share with rednecks is that they are generally located relatively far from major urban centres and their accompanying wealth of choices in retail establishments, as well as libraries. Remember, this was before the days of the internet.

Aside from that, I'm sure there were cultural aspects, such as a general desire for self-improvement and a chance for a better education for the kids, for which an encyclopedia was a powerful symbol and, potentially, a useful tool.

Whatever the reasons, very often if you knocked on an Indian family's door, they would act like they were lucky to invite you in, listen spellbound to the pitch, and then sign the sales contract and credit application gratefully at the end. Too easy.

Only two problems: one, they actually had to pass a credit check and two, you don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, so we were careful about not overworking the reservations. In fact, a night of knocking on doors on a reservation was used as a reward to be teased with for a particularly hard or motivated worker. There was no bigger carrot. As for the credit check (and, more generally, being able to afford the product at all), that's why we looked for the brand new pickup in every driveway. That's the right kind of reservation for a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman.

Sometimes, of course, one would simply get lucky and find an Indian family living among the rednecks. That's what happened to me in 100 Mile House, British Columbia. The first time Mitch told me we were driving there, I had to ask him if this was the real name of a town, or if it was some kind of inside joke. No joke: 100 Mile House is a real honest-to-goodness town. They even have a McDonald's.

(To be continued . . .)