I answered an ad in the local newspaper, for a summer job, about earning $400-600 a week. I should have known that if something seems too good to be true it probably is.in training the Kirby people, local distributors, talk about how good the money is. They talk about how nice they are to be paying you around $15 an hour starting out.
Then at the end of the meeting they tell you that you are to be at work at 9AM and you usually get off at 9PM. It turns out this is six days a week and Sunday is not required but strongly recommended. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that Kirby employees are not starting out at $15 dollars an hour if they are working 84 hour weeks.
Now to the real reason I am writing this. I rode around with around 10 sales people to finish my training with Kirby which consisted of watching several people giver their "pitch". It was during this time that I realized that the Kirby Company distributor I was working for, and I would say all others, are not a place that I could work and feel good about myself.
To get in the door someone lies and says that they will clean a room and it will only take about 15 minutes. This is a complete lie because the salesperson has no intention of spending less than an hour in your house. They have to at least be there an hour and show all of the uses for the vacuum to get credit. A person has to give 15 demonstrations a week to get paid.
It seemed that everyone I shadowed only cared about this magic number. They didnt care about how they were imposing on anyone or how much of someone else's time that they were taking up. Often times they were insulting to the person that invite them into their home.
Of the seven different people I watched giving demonstrations, all of them basically said the same thing but mixed in their own lies to make the person watching the demonstration more sympathetic to the salesperson.
If you ever decide to buy a Kirby vacuum cleaner, DO NOT PAY $2000. It is possible to get one for $1000. Just keep on telling the salesperson that you cant afford it and they will "magically" remember a special deal that they forgot to apply to the price. The only reason that they chalk the price up is because it cuts into the commission that they will make off of the sale.
If anyone is reading this that has worked for a Kirby distributor, this statement is not POSITIVE.
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