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I know this is an old post and the OP is long gone but I have to put in my two cents for anyone considering selling Kirby vacuums.
In a nut shell, DON"T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!
I tried it once when I was about 20 years old and I can say that was the phoniest job ever. First off, you don't get paid for the 3 days of training. Secondly, they tell you that you don't have to do any door to door because all the leads are already set up for you. You want to know what I was told on the first day out in the field? " Go knock on doors". LOL
AH yes, the old bait & switch, "There's no cold calling...", then after training, "Oh, yeah, it's actually all cold calling."
I've never had a vacuum salesperson come to the door, but if one did, I'd have a hard time not laughing. I feel bad for anyone who has to take that kind of job.
I never worked for Kirby, but I did sell one of their competitors for a few months shortly after my first post-college employer went bankrupt.
We didn't have to go door-to-door. What we did have to do was go to supermarket parking lots and put fliers under windshields offering "free gifts" (which were actually a small box of samples from leading CPG companies, so maybe $10 of stuff that cost my employer pennies, if anything). People would call the office about their free gift at which point we qualified the lead - will both you and your husband be home, any kids, house size, etc. and try to set up the appointment. And we set up a lot of appointments.
We did not get paid for demos, only for sales. You made a pittance on the 1st vacuum sold that week, an OK amount on the 2nd of the week and a lot on the 3rd of the week and so on. And next week you started from scratch. Most of the revenue from the 1st and 2nd sales went to your manager's override and his regional manager's override and the home office. They made out well. You didn't.
However, one week I did make $675 from selling 3 vacuums. Which is about $2200 in 2014 dollars. Or $114K/year if you could keep that up for an entire year. Nobody does. You could really only do 3 demos a night max, so even selling just one per week was a 5% conversion rate, which isn't bad for this kind of sales tactic.
The demos were a trip. Our vacuum used a canister of water instead of a bag. We showed up with a high-powered spotlight and shined it on your current vacuum while you turned it on. You'd see a ton of dust fly out - didn't matter what brand you had (almost all vacs had cloth bags back in 1979). We asked you to vacuum a part of your rug. Then we'd vacuum that same spot and the water in the canister would get filthy. It was quite impressive. We went up against some Kirbys and ate 'em alive.
It does sound like Kirby runs a bit of a scam. But not on the consumer - it's on the prospective newbie salesperson. The consumer will be paying a premium and be subject to all sorts of high-pressure closing tactics, but in the end, they get a decent product, if not at the best price. But it's not worthless junk. The salespeople, however, are simply meat to be consumed and defecated out the other end.
Everyone in high school has that friend who didn't want to get a job so they got the kirby vaccum job and made you and your family sit through their demo.
LOL, selling Kirby's is a scam. I once knew someone who did this, and he made no money from the demos or from selling them. The Kirby salesmen romance the customers with a faked sob story about some contest they're trying to win.
I still believe the Kirby is an amazing product, though I'd rather get one for about $500-600 on ebay online. I just wouldn't buy one from a Kirby dealer, because they'd jack up the price to 4 times more than that and put customers in debt.
Yep, realize old thread, and didn't read through pages 2-7 :P
That said, I attempted both Kirby and Cutco knives as a late teenager. Kirby was an utter failure, and I could see the "system" was stacked well against me halfway through the training day. But heck, I enjoyed a good challenge, and decided to push through anyways. I "attempted" it for about a week, blew through about $100 of my own money in gas (one of those parts they kind of gloss over in the training - you pay for ALL expenses up front, and get "reimbursed" IF you make a sale, out of the money you make on the sale. Don't sell anything, you don't even get reimbursed for gas money), and whatever fast food garbage I ate while out there, and gave up.
It's not that I gave up too easy, just that I saw what it would really take to make the kind of money they claimed was possible, and realized it just wasn't realistic.
I later gave the Cutco knives thing a shot, and never made it past the training phase of that one. I particularly remember their demonstration that was supposed to show how superior Cutco knives are. They had a selection of cheap dollar store type knives that was supposed to be representative of the typical knives found in people's kitchen, and showed how it took 8,9,10 or more strokes to slice a tomato...if it even sliced it at all. One of the knives they used was a very dull serrated knife that just mangled the tomato. The Cutco knife did it in 3 strokes.
I whipped out my very well maintained Colt folding knife, and whipped through that sucker in a single stroke, with a huge smile on my face, and asked the guy running the training how I would handle such a situation in the field, seeing as how we're supposed to start by doing the demo for our friends and family, then get referrals from them...knowing that at least in my family, we all have very high quality cutlery (and we had even better stuff in the kitchen than I carried in my pocket on a daily basis)
He tells me not to worry about that, because that will never happen. Funny...I believe it just did....he was not amused, lol.
After learning that I would also have to front the cost of the demo knife set (something like $200...in the late 90s, for a broke kid...), in addition to hitting up my friends and family to buy this stuff AND refer their friends and family to push this stuff on, AND a poor guidance team...I knew this was going to be a waste of my time as well.
To this day, I still have yet to meet a single person that made any money off either Kirby or Cutco....
After learning that I would also have to front the cost of the demo knife set (something like $200...in the late 90s, for a broke kid...), in addition to hitting up my friends and family to buy this stuff AND refer their friends and family to push this stuff on, AND a poor guidance team...I knew this was going to be a waste of my time as well.
To this day, I still have yet to meet a single person that made any money off either Kirby or Cutco....
One of our pastors at our church told a story about how he used to sell Cutco for a while when he was in college. He said he was good at it and making decent money, but he ended up quitting because he felt guilty, as he knew a lot of people buying the knives couldn't really afford them.
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