Death of a Salesman — Page 3

IN PRE-CONFEDERATION CANADA, the travelling peddlar was a feature of rural and small-town life. Perhaps the most common door-to-door canvasser was the bookseller, who travelled backroads offering farmers the chance to get their work-worn hands on encyclopedias, biographies, religious texts and the like without having to rumble off to the big city. In 1883, the Winnipeg Daily Times ran an article counting door-to-door booksellers—along with houseflies, mosquitoes, and rabid dogs—among the summer’s most irritating pests. The Direct Seller’s Association of Canada, in its “History of Direct Selling,” used to cite on its homepage “convenience to inhabitants of rural areas” as one of the benefits of direct selling.

The DSA acts as an umbrella organization for more than 50 member companies. Some have familiar names: Avon, Kirby, Weekenders; others, like PartyLite, have only been around since the 1990s. All use some form of direct sales, a term that encompasses telephone sales, internet sales, door-to-door, and “party plans”—any salesperson-consumer interaction, in short, that takes place outside a typical retail environment. The DSA doesn’t keep track of how many of its companies still work door-to-door, though they know the number has declined.

In the 1950s and 1960s, all sorts of door-to-door people, from vacuum cleaner hawkers to Fuller Brush salesmen, walked the right-angled, sapling-lined streets of developing suburbs. Many a university student made the rounds trying to sign people up for a set of Encyclopedia Britannica (the hitch was that you had to subscribe to a 10-year annual update). In cities like Vancouver, any residential area outside the downtown core offered a plucky salesperson all the material he or she needed: houses, doorbells, and a wealth of consumer needs waiting to be met.

“Society has changed,” says Ross Creber, president of the DSA, who started out as a Tupperware distributor. “There’s no doubt that people are less ready to open their doors than they used to be. It’s also true that there aren’t as many rural folks out of reach of stores. Even if they are, they probably have high-speed internet to connect them to eBay. When we have internet shopping, gated communities, and good old-fashioned malls to serve us, can door-to-door really persist?

“All industries have to adapt to the times,” he adds. “Door-to-door is taking a different approach, too. You’ll see more of it being appointment-based—someone’ll drop off a catalogue, then the customer calls to arrange a home visit.”

New products and services sometimes lend themselves to door-to-door, as a recent job posting on the Telus website attests. The job type is sales; the location is Burnaby; the job description is enthusiastic but vague: “The Consumer Solutions team is fortifying their sales contingent for direct to consumer marketing.” Nowhere do the words “door-to-door” appear, but in the list of the successful applicant’s qualities and qualifications you’ll find “ability to walk for extended periods.” The applicant will also need “the utmost professionalism in presentation, communication, and knowledge; customer contacts are face to face in a residential setting.” How’s this for irony: Telus is using door-to-door salespeople to sign customers up for the company’s high-speed internet service.

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