One of my all-time favorite sit-com characters was a guy named Mr. Herd on the old “Bob Newhart Show.” Oliver Clark played Mr. Herd in just eight episodes of the show, but I always loved him. Do you remember him? He was the very shy, self-deprecating guy whose tie was always upside down.
In one episode he told of how he’d taken a job selling door-to-door. He said he’d gone up onto the porch and stood there all day hoping for someone to come out and buy his product.
I spent one day as a door-to-door salesman in the summer of 1958. I was 19 years old and pretty naive. I had just finished my freshman year in college, and I needed a summer job. The only jobs available in my hometown were canning factory labor, and I really didn’t want to do that. I saw an ad in the Oshkosh Northwestern looking for students to conduct a “survey.”
The “survey” turned out to be a euphemism for a door-to-door sales job. Publishing companies were doing pretty well in the ’50s using young people to sell their encyclopedias door-to-door.
I went to a daylong meeting on the college campus, along with a group of other students, where we were all trained to deliver a canned presentation. The gist of the spiel was that the company was looking for a “limited number” of homes where we could place our fine set of encyclopedias free of charge.
There was a catch, though: in exchange for the free set of encyclopedias, the family had to agree to do two things: 1) they had to write a testimonial, which the company could use in its advertising, and 2) they had to agree to protect the company’s “investment” in them by purchasing a yearbook each year for the next 10 years, which would keep the encyclopedias up-to-date.
The yearbooks, of course, cost something like $45 each – I don’t remember the actual price, but it was close to the actual market value of the set of encyclopedias. And $450 was a lot of money in 1958!
So we spent a whole Friday learning this sales pitch, and on Monday they took us out into a neighborhood to try to “give away” our encyclopedias. When I said I was young and naive, I was young and naive. I believed every word of that canned spiel I had memorized over the weekend.
I had convinced myself that those encyclopedias were being given to those families free of charge, and it was reasonable to ask people to care enough to keep their set current!
But after knocking on about 15 doors and going through my pitch, I had not placed a single set of encyclopedias. Finally, an old guy answered his door and invited me in to do my thing. When I’d finished, he just laughed and told me that the sales pitch was really just a lie; that this whole thing about placing them free was just a way to get people to think they were getting something for nothing. I was surprised and shocked.
Looking back now, it’s a little hard to imagine how I could have been that naive, but I was.
Well, that was it for me. I couldn’t bring myself to lie to people anymore. At the end of the day, I told the manager that I was quitting, and I went home and took a job loading pea vines for the Gillett Canning Company.
But believe it or not, we bought a set of World Book encyclopedias from a door-to-door salesman when our kids were quite young - and we bought the annual yearbooks to keep it updated. But I knew exactly what I was doing!
Encyclopedia publishers have been dramatically affected by technological advances of the past few decades. I read that at one time, World Book employed more than 40,000 door-to-door salespeople. But as computers became more accessible to consumers in the 1980s, direct sales of encyclopedia sets to families declined, and World Book and others cut down to very small sales forces, primarily serving the school and library markets.
And now, as schools and libraries have become more and more digitized, who knows how long it will be before encyclopedias completely disappear in book form. No more naive young kids will be going door-to-door giving away sets of reference books!
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