If you are a lawyer and read this, I urge you to contact me ASAP. I was living back on the East Coast for a little bit working various internships. I really liked it, so i wanted to go ahead and try to find a full time job. I found a posting for a place called Image Imports, located in what I believe to be Wooburn MA. I would prefer to not mention my experience, but I have a lot of experience in the sports industry. Walking into the office and seeing Patriots stuff on the walls, I knew it was the place for me.
I went through the first interview, and the manager there Dave Levine said he liked me so much he didn't even need another interview and offered me the job on the spot. So I said great, I'll take it! Instead of being a typical 9-5 job like he said, you actually show up at 7am to go through "training."
You show up at 7am, if your clock turns 7:01 and you're not there, you get a call wondering where you are. You then go through training sessions in the mornign where you practice going over pitches on how to sell people pieces of crap. When you come in the office and leave, you can't speak a word to anybody in the waiting room. You can't make eye contact or you'll get in trouble. "You're getting this awesome remote control car for just $4.99! These are normally $49.99 at Radio Shack! But because we are out here promoting it for Radio Shack, we are able to cut out all the costs!" To me, at first this makes sense from a business standpoint. Little did I know, and little did Dave know, he was messing with the wrong person.
See, I'm not a moron, I'm very intelligent and pick up on things very fast. After the first day, I noticed something was very VERY wrong. It's a cash only business, so no paper trails. We got paid in cash, seemed real fishy to me. Especially when during our morning meetings, we would have these cult sessions to "pump everybody up."
From there you would go to "territories" and literally try to sell them pieces of crap. The second day is when i started getting very suspicious. People in little stores were saying "oh yeah, people from your business have come by here before. The cars I got were pieces of *#*%! I want my money back." We were then supposed to tell them no refunds, but we could hook them up with a "sweet deal." So you would try and sucker them into buying more pieces of crap for even better deals.
At the end of the day, you turn in your cash and you get paid on a daily basis. During the week that I worked there, there were days when guys wouldn't get rid of any of their stuff, and they would come back to the office and literally leave with $0. So they wasted their time, money on food and money on gas for that day, putting them in a hole.
Now for the spicey part of this. We were getting in "Patriots and Red Sox Merchandise." Long story short, I found out that all their merchandise is made from the poorest quality of materials. We were told that we were supposed to tell people that we were actually representatives from the New England Patriots, and that we were out promoting their new stuff. Little did they know, I was actually working for the Patriots while I was back there, and I knew that people would be pi*ed off at the team when they thought "real reps" from the team were selling them shotty merchandise. So I alerted the Patriots, told them exactly what was going on, and quit that night. The next day Dave tried calling me to have me come in to talk about opening up my own office and making $100,000 after a year or so of working there. I never called him back.
To those of you out there who read this, don't buy into their scams. You will know it when you see it.
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