c9 | In-home Marketing, take 2

Today we had a visit from the Canadian Family Farms Organic Something Or Other, a company that sells meat (and a few other groceries) direct to consumers, rather than advertising and placing product in stores. The way it works is you buy an entire year's worth of meat. $2697.00 worth. And they give you a freezer to put it in. Plus you can refer friends and get a kickback, and so forth. All those typical different-path marketing tools / pyramid scheme tools, though this isn't, I don't think. pyramidal in any way.

The gimmick? They call you up, and offer you a free sample of their Grade A1 meat, but when they drop it off they come in and give you the little sales pitch. Not at all painful, and only about ten minutes of our time, and it was time well spent. 'Did you buy the meat?!?' you may be asking, incredulously. Certainly not. But the sales rep who dropped off our meat, and mades the sales pitch, was a hot piece of meat himself. 26 or so, blond/blue/built -- Ontario farm boy all the way. Mmmm. Straight though. No porn happened.

They originally called and Vinny answered, and when he got off the phone he said, "I think I did a bad thing. The Canadian Whatever Whatever is bringing me and my wife some free meat." He then claimed that he would not be home for their visit, and I would be. Ha! As it turns out, we both went to IKEA. Today though, they found us. I didn't marvel at their persistence after seeing the price tag.

A few years ago we were offered a free gift, either scissors or some Ginsu knives. I accepted, which led us into a one hour in-home demonstration of the Suction Queen, and multi-thousand-dollar vacuum cleaner that was probably sold to widows and idiots. The vacuum was something like $1600, plus hoses, plus attachments, etc etc $ $ $. Scary.

The sales pitch was delivered by a young woman who planned to quit the job soon, hated it, and had such a hard time finding our place she almost quit before getting there. We spent most of the time making fun of the product with her. Why didn't we just say thanks but no thanks? She would get in trouble. She had to call in when she started, and call in when finishing her pitch, and when I originally tried to tell her we only had half an hour, she said she would have to come back another time to finish.

It turned out to be fun, aided greatly by her demo of the vacuum using ours as the crappy model to be replaced. She vacuumed one spot about eight times using our vacuum, then tried out hers and it picked up very little. It helped that ours was pretty much brand new ("we use it every six months whether we need to or not!").

In that case we also did not sign on any dotted, dashed, or solid lines. We still have the Ginsu knives (well, one of five. the others fell apart over the following two years), and the free ground beef is in the freezer awaiting a suitable hunger. Mmmm.