Welcome back to the newsletter where I tell the same story 100 times. We have some new subscribers, so before today’s installment — the longest yet — let’s refresh ourselves on the ur-text:
Minimum viable product
In the summer between high school and college, I sold kitchen knives from a catalog. I couldn't convince people to buy much, but I did convince myself these were the best knives at any price. I did get my mom to order a jackknife for my dad's birthday. It came in the mail; the package was in the car as my mom drove me to the airport for a church missions trip. In the passenger seat I opened up the knife to demonstrate the safety mechanism, and in the attempt I sliced open my palm. Next summer I sold donuts from behind a counter.
And now:
Economic analysis
The cutlery company — the company that made the knives, which owned the company that sold the knives — was represented by a sales force of college students and rising freshmen. At the time of my service, we earned payment through two methods: at first, a minimum stipend per completed presentation of the sales pitch to a willing prospect of legal age (one prospect per household). This was quickly surpassed by a commission of rising percentage per value of goods sold — in theory. In my case, the commissions remaining flat, I earned my stipend by unproductive sales-hours alone. It is perhaps here that I developed my lifelong (so far) over-reliance on effort (rather than results) as a measure of the value of my labor. But not in the Marxist way.
My underperformance triggered a visit to the sales office, where I demonstrated my pitch to the regional manager. He advised me to cut it down from ninety minutes; I couldn’t possibly see how *less* discussion of the knives’ many selling points would render *more* sales. Though it likely would have increased the referrals to further prospects.
My theory: My lack of sales stemmed partly from my exhausting and uninspiring pitch, but mostly from the cost of the knives (over $800 for the kitchen set) vs. the average income of my prospects (let’s say $50,000 a year per household). The more successful sales reps were the children of white-collar professionals. (This aspect is further explored in another volume of the work.)
At the time of my employment, sales reps purchased their own wares for demonstration, at a discount, before earning any income. It is in this aspect that I must concede the operation does resemble “Amway” or even a “pyramid scheme.” (While customers were asked to “refer” further sales leads, there was no blurring of the line between customer and representative, beyond this sample ware “startup cost.”)
The sample wares were ours to keep; I owned and enjoyed mine for well over a decade. Some time after my employment, the charge for the sample was discontinued. I don’t wish to defend the company, but I note that the following year, at a popular Canada-based donut chain, I had the cost of my (pocketless) uniform deducted from my first paycheck. At both jobs, gas and other incidentals were my own responsibility.
“Be your own boss” was the sales pitch to the reps — the meta-sales pitch. It was this prospect, or its aesthetics, that drew me. I wore a tie; I had plenty, to meet the chapel-day dress code of my grubby Baptist school. (I struggle in adulthood to convey the distinction between the prototypical “private school” and my own experience, but it only recently dawned on me to consider whether my education, Latin-free, AP-class-free, and heavy on literal interpretation of Biblical scripture, might still constitute some economic privilege.)
“Time to make the donuts,” says the baker in an old commercial, and at the cutlery company our sales manager used this slogan as metonym for the poor sap punching the clock. This summer, we reps would rise above the usual crummy summer job — even among the wealthier students here, it was typical to earn one’s extra cash in food service — and make our early entrance into the professional world (one I fully expected to join, encouraged by my father, a tool-and-die manufacturer for an American auto maker, and my mother, a part-time substitute teacher and library clerk).
“Time to make the donuts” became to me symbolic of the entire working class, and in the soft clay of my teenage mind, proof that the way out was to make one’s own time, to choose one’s own donuts, to buy a really classy pair of boots and pull up on the straps. Armed with “Time to make the donuts,” I could even blame my prospects for their failure to recognize my genius sales pitch, my business savvy — as the math proved that buying the $800 knife set, with its lifetime guarantee, would save them money in the long run. O how the poor sow the seeds of their own ruin, by investing only in the day presently before them! So I could see my failure as the failure instead of my proletariat stock.
This attitude was impossible to hide — I was never a tactful man — and it did not help my luck getting referrals to future victims. So I grew more desperate for this dwindling resource, hounding my parents for the contact info of lesser and lesser acquaintances.
This was far from my first time engaging in the capitalist drive to financialize every aspect of human relations — I once organized a betting pool over how long the marching band teacher would pray before each parade — but it was the first time anyone called me out on it: Through my little brother’s summer soccer camp, my parents were making new family friends, and I pestered my mother so incessantly for an introduction that she declared I would never meet the Oppedisanos.
Yet it was my mother to whom I made my first and only sale, a gift for her husband my father, and on the other hand a gift for me. Note the capacity of the domesticized feminine to convert capitalist profit motive back into gift economy, emotional labor conducted with pleasure, and procurement for the blue-collar worker of some small means of production.
It was my mother who mended my self-inflicted wound (fertile territory for later feminist and Freudian analysis), and my mother who ensured that this last cost exacted by my summer scam would not delay my departure on a missions trip to Mexico — the missionary, that strange bedfellow of empire.
It was my mother who, how consciously I dare not ask, worried a deeper wound every morning the following summer, as I dressed for work at the Henrietta highway-exit Tim Hortons. Her friendly refrain as I walked out the door: “Time to make the donuts!”