I'm not sure who else may remember it, but when I was young my siblings and I would watch a movie called The Music Man. I remember the 76 trombones and the man in red who marched out in front and directed their every movement.
I remember Maid Marion and her stuck up library scene that seemed to both embarrass and delight her. I remember the high twinkling notes of the piano as Marion and Harold Hill sang their duet under the seemingly full moon. And I remember the ever annoying anvil salesman.
I remember how he was the so-called bad guy. How he got distracted by Marion on his way to rat-out Harold Hill. I remember associating, from that point on, salesman under a negative light.
So how many others are like me? How many other children sat on their grandmother's living room floor in front of the television and made the same determination that salesmen were altogether bad people. Apparently a lot.
The door-to-door salesman was not well respected perhaps because there were rumors of faulty products being sold. We've all seen cartoons or parodies that portray the salesman trying to sell something to a potential customer, but then when he goes to demonstrate how the product works, it breaks or malfunctions.
One of my favorite examples of this is Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times. In this 1936 silent film, Chaplin works in a factory. During his lunch break one day, a traveling salesman comes into the factory to demonstrate a newly devised eating machine that he boasts will allow production to continue while the men eat their lunch.
When the salesman asks for one of the men as a volunteer, Chaplin is volunteered by his boss and steps forward. Although the feeding machine works fine for a few minutes, the salesman eventually has to eat his own words when his machine runs amok and poor Chaplin is covered head-to-toe with lunch.
Unfortunately, the slow metamorphosis of the door-to-door salesman has revealed a much uglier creature: the telemarketer.
Some have suggested that the reasoning for this transformation from face-to-face sales to over-the-phone sales is due to the fact that you can't shoot someone over the phone.
According to Wikipedia, the great online encyclopedia, the 1950's not only was the era of the cashmere sweater, the poodle skirt, and the bobby sock, but the birth of telemarketing.
DialAmerica Marketing, Inc. was founded in 1957 as a strictly phone-sale company. After 1976, however, drastic expansion began on their telemarketing programs. They began working with big-name companies such as Bank of America, GE, America Online, and CompuServe. They also helped over 300 magazines, including Reader's Digest and People, with their telemarketing techniques.
Currently DialAmerica Marketing, Inc. is the largest privately owned telemarketing company nationwide. They have over 8,000 employees and bring in over $185 million per year. They also place over 250 million incoming and outgoing calls per year.
DialAmerica Marketing, Inc. is a national company, with many of their offices being for outgoing calls only. The exact locations of these offices, however, are being omitted from this article, for fear some of my readers may take the shotgun to the company that may have started the whole telemarketing fiasco.
So, what can we do to avoid the annoying telemarketing calls? According to Junkbusters there is a simple script you could follow in order to reduce the number of telemarketing calls you receive. However, if you don't want to follow the script, an abbreviated version would just be to tell the person on the other line to "please take me off your list, and don't call again." The basic principle here being to just let them know you don't want to be bothered.
We don't know how the telemarketing craze is going to modify with new technology that comes out. Maybe they will find a way to broadcast through our televisions in order to get that one-on-one personal feeling back without having to worry about getting shot. But whatever the case, we know there will always be someone out there trying to sell you something you don't want or don't need, and the bottom line is that we just need a better way to tell them to leave us alone.
