Seriously: get lost

[sigma7]

Attention people of Earth: I am not interested in buying magazines from you to "help you go on a trip." I am not interested in the "leftover steaks" you have in the back of your truck. I am not interested in purchasing anything from you, if only because your attitude that the importance of your need to sell whatever it is you're peddling is somehow more important than the rare time I have to myself on a Saturday morning. If you believe banging on doors at random is a valid business plan, allow me to introduce you to reality of the harshest variety.

I have, heretofore, been altogether courteous and polite with my interactions with wandering salespeople. But I'm going to have to step up my game. I'm not planning on shooting through the door randomly as if I were beset by salesmoose, but the thought has occurred to me.

Edit: Twice in one morning? You have bothered me and rattled the birds. Now I'm all in a stabby mood.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Every entrance to my apartment building has a huge "NO SOLICITATION" sign. But I still get these idiots. Probably because they have no idea what the scary long word on the sign means.

[endersgame3.livejournal.com]

are you kidding me?!?!

*is suddenly glad the buzzer to her apartment only works about 20% of the time*

[kadyg.livejournal.com]

Might I suggest answering the door completely naked? A friend of mine did this once with Jehovah's Witnesses and they never bothered him - or anyone else in the building - ever again.

Also: Selling steaks out of the trunk of a car? Seriously?

[ronwe.livejournal.com]

As I work in a restaurant, I can probably explain this a bit better as I've had to deal with it.

Most restaurants place two food orders a week. Ours technically places four, but that's because we order from two separate companies, Bridgebrand and Sysco.

Each delivery we're usually getting a box of steaks. They're still fresh, just vacuum sealed and put in a box, so, you know, no blood all over everything.

The way this scam goes is, since we - and every other restaurant that orders steaks - order by weight and not by number of steaks, all a shifty driver has to do is open up the box and take one or two steaks out, set them aside, and the restaurants typically won't notice that the box is maybe a pound or two lighter than it should be.

Then, at the end of their route, they stop by restaurants that aren't on their delivery route or are even customers of whichever company they work for. They then say that there was an extra box of steaks that got put int he truck by accident and, hey, would you like to buy them at a discounted price since the warehouse won't take them back?

The real catch here is that that last point, for a lot of these companies is true, and sometimes the drivers are encouraged to attempt to sell the leftovers at a discounted price in order to possibly open up another restaurant for them to sell to. The way to tell if it's actually legit is if the delivery guy asks to be paid in cash instead of having a cheque cut for the company.

Of course, we now just buy the meat for our steaks uncut, and cut them ourselves. It takes maybe ten minutes, all the steaks look big and juicy and are the right weight, and we don't have to deal with this shenanigans.

So, it's not out of the trunk of a car which even Billy Joe Bob from Hicksville would think is shady, but from the back of a delivery truck belonging to a legit food service company. Still shady as all hell, but the truck plus the uniform gives it enough legitimacy for it to work.

This comment is far too long. My apologies for that, but I hope I shed some light on that shady topic.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard about it before getting approached with this simply...idiotic offer, and it took more than a bit of Googling before coming up with, yeah, more or less what you just said. Here's hoping that someone else learns from this. Because knowing is half the battle, and the other half is apparently resisting purloined sirloin.

Still, even if there was room in the freezer, even if I were convinced of the veracity of your sketchy tale, even if I had utmost confidence in the quality and safety of your food, if you're coming to my house and trying to sell it to me, I'm not buying it. A few times is an aberration, but this is happening often enough to worry that my address is on a list (especially when steak-guy skipped over my next-door neighbor).

[kadyg.livejournal.com]

I work in/with restaurants too and am aware of the scam. I was a surprised that someone thought that knocking on apartment doors was a good idea. I live in a big city with a lot of restaurants - someone is always trying to run some sort of racket, but it's usually contained to the industry.

As far as I know, no one here is selling raw meat door-to-door and being any kind of sucess at it - yet. Maybe it hasn't migrated this far west yet.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

It's not as bad as some ideas I've come up with on my own. The only problem with one of these salespeople "disappearing" on their route is that it's going to take five or ten of them to go missing before they can identify it as a trend and that my locale Should Not Be Visited. But I think answering the door au naturel would transcend simple homicide, making a simple crime into a war crime, and I'd like to keep the Belgians out of this one if at all possible. We...have a thing. It's a long story.