Selling Kirby Vacuums Door-to-door and the Thin Line Between Honest Advertising and Scams

Originally published: May 4th 2011, 9:00 PM EST

Kirby is one of the most interesting companies in America. Not always in a good way though.

A few facts about the company- Kirby is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and was founded in 1914. It is currently owned by Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire-Hathaway and has always sold its vacuum systems door-to-door only. In fact, in-home demonstrations and word-of-mouth are the only way the company advertises at all. The company sells over 500,000 machines a year worldwide, generating revenue of over $1 billion per year.

I spent a month and a half at the Huntsville office from the end of February to the middle of April, 2011. The money can be quite good if you are able and willing to convince people to pay $1500+ for a vacuum. They make it easier than it sounds, actually.

Like I said, the company is interesting, but not always good interesting. Here's my breakdown:

Good interesting
-The vacuum is actually quite good at capturing dust (see the first link at end of this page)
- Kirby never advertises on TV or online.
- ALL advertising and sales are either face-to-face interaction or occasionally through a phone.
- The job often involves a lot of driving around in vans, and a lot of late hours, so Kirby offices can become a tight-knit group of people.

Bad interesting
- Kirby circulates inspirational/instructional videos that encourage dealers to create unscientific fears in customers and embarrass customers into buying.
- Kirby sells many of its machines through underpaid, new dealers who are told about quick promotion opportunities that often never come up.
- All new dealers sign contracts stating they are independent sales representatives, but many Kirby offices tell them they are on a salary system anyway, so they can threaten to fire them if they don't follow that office's Program. As a result, despite "being on a salary", some new dealers earn less than minimum wage when they struggle to sell the vacuums for high-dollar amounts.

Kirby's business model is different and impressive. My main complaint is the way the company pressures dealers into strict adherence to the Program. The heart of the Program are the “5 musts” of a full-factory demonstration. Two of the “musts”, mattress test and shampoo, make good sense and are designed to give customer enough information to make an informed decision. 2 others, making a friend and the sales contest, are standard sales tools and are to be expected with advertising.

It took me a while to understand the 100+ pads though. 100 is a big number, especially when each pad has to be separately installed. Most people expect the demonstration to take 30-40 minutes when they agree to it, but a full demonstrations that pulls 100 pads takes an hour, and often a lot longer. I usually just did between 30 and 50 of them and felt that was plenty to show the customer what the machine could do, although sometimes I would do around 75.

The strategy admittedly works. Working with Kirby showed me how people respond to social scripts.

If your house looks like a mess from these little, white dirt pads [seen here] from a vacuum demonstration, and then a nicely-dressed manager comes in, you will probably feel embarrassed about how your home looks. In order to stop feeling embarrassed, you are much more likely to purchase an expensive vacuum cleaner from the nicely-dressed manager.

I might have stayed longer if it was just about getting customers to pay top dollar because they liked me. The Program though, encourages dealers to use ill-founded fear and embarrassment when necessary to get the sale. If I was good enough at it and needed the money enough, I don't doubt would have stayed. But even after a month and a half, I wasn't great at it, and the $250 a week I was getting wasn't worth putting up with what I disliked about the Program, although working with the people at my office really helped me learn how to be extraverted, and that alone made my time there worthwhile.

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I actually have a lot of respect for Kirby people. It's a high-stress job, that requires you to constantly learn and adapt to new situations. Also, it's easy to believe the spin that Kirby puts on the health issues and also easy to accept the Program as simply part of the job.

What interests me most about the job is the advertising aspect. Most producers outsource advertising to slick PR firms. These firms make carefully-tested, high-budget ads for TV or online that depict whoever owns the target product or service as cool, and whoever does not own it, as out-of-touch. Kirby, however, uses only face-to-face interaction between customers and employees, who are often new to the job. Every firm in a market system must promote an image of the firm that is usually going to exaggerate the firm's strengths. Image is the only thing in determining the market price of a product, a service, or stock.

So does Kirby exaggerate the proof backing its claims of the dangers that dust mites pose to people's health? Does Kirby exaggerate the ease of using the machine and its ability to “protect the value of your couches and chairs”? Yes, but every firm in a market economy exaggerates its image to potential customers. The main difference is that other firms hire advertising agencies to “do the dirty work” of spinning and exaggerating how good its products and services are. Outsourcing the dirty work allows salaried employees to feel good about helping consumers that for whatever reason “have to have” the product or service, while CEOs and shareholders enjoy the bigger share of the profits.

Finally, I realized I would rather not get paid and be able to express myself, than to get paid by through the Kirby Program. Kirby is a high-stress job and it's easy for beginning employees to be used by the Program and come out with bad experiences. I found my time with Kirby interesting and exciting. It's an experience I'm glad to have had, but not something I expect to go back to.


Here are a couple of articles I found that help to explain what Kirby does:

About the actual Kirby vacuum-shampoo system -
http://reviews.ebay.com/DYSON-OR-KIRBY-VACUUM-Which-is-the-best-vacuum_W0QQugidZ10000000003855053

experiences with Kirby salespeople -
http://paintermommy.com/kirby-vacuums

about dust mites:
what Kirby says – (couldn't find a website that has the document that Kirby gives out to all its offices, but what it says is pretty similar to this one):
http://www.indoorpurifiers.com/dust-mites.htm
what Science says –
http://www.drugs.com/news/dust-mites-trump-asthma-prevention-guidelines-11794.html

about being a salesperson:
http://johnneymanjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/the-ultimate-salesman.pdf

Thoughts on Avoiding Identification with My Job

There is a great veil over our eyes that blinds us from all spiritual matters. The veil causes us to equate our personal freedom with the tyranny of the free-market. The veil hides from us our ability to grow spiritually, and leaves us scrambling to grow our retirement portfolios instead.

The veil originated with the Protestant Work Ethic. In the words of Erich Fromm:

“In making the individual feel worthless and insignificant as far as his own merits are concerned, in making him feel like a powerless tool in the hands of God, [Luther] deprived man of the self-confidence and of the feeling of human dignity which is the premise for any firm stand against oppressing secular authorities. In the course of the historical evolution the results of Luther’s teachings were still more far-reaching. Once the individual had lost his sense of pride and dignity, he was psychologically prepared to lose the feeling which had been characteristic of the medieval thinking, namely, that man, his spiritual salvation, and his spiritual aims were the purpose of life; he was prepared to accept a role in which his life became a means to purposes outside of himself, those of economic productivity and accumulation of capital. Luther’s views on economic problems were typically medieval, still more so than Calvin’s. He would have abhorred the idea that man’s life should become a means for economic ends. But while his thinking on economic matters was the traditional one, his emphasis on the nothingness of the individual was in contrast and paved the way for a development in which man not only was to obey secular authorities but had to subordinate his life to the ends of economic achievements.” [Escape from Freedom. p. 83-84]

With the loss of pride and dignity of spiritual pursuits, the church planted the seeds for its increasing marginality in today's increasingly globalized, media-driven culture.

The puritanical doctrine that humanity is first and foremost sinful tore down centuries worth of spiritual wisdom and allowed the predatory, survival-of-the-fittest nature to come crashing back into the center of the Protestant's consciousness. Hard work shifted from an external pressure that people pursued with specific aims, to an inner compulsion undertaken as a moral duty. The willingness to soberly and determinedly work indicated faith in the Protestant doctrines of the individual's powerlessness and hopelessly sinful state, and so the dutiful believer placed faith instead in the authority of a higher power (the Church, or the political orator, or the infallibility of the free market.) [Fromm, p. 119]

Markets, like anything, have both pluses and minuses. While they efficiently produce and distribute material goods, they unfortunately treat human labor as just another commodity also.

Imagine for a minute that every occupation made roughly an equal amount of money, with the more arduous jobs (coal-mining, jobs involving lots of heavy lifting) and jobs that required extensive training receiving a deserving percentage more (between 10% - 50% perhaps). Presumably people would pick their careers on the basis of natural interest and emotional considerations.

Markets, however, manipulate people into doing otherwise. Markets will pay a worker upwards of 200% - 1000% of the median income to development a specialized skill, often involving intense rational development within a narrow field of knowledge. Anyone making upwards of three, five, or ten times the median income has a strong incentive to permanently identify their career with who they are, whether or not they have a natural interest or emotional fondness for the work. The man who has a strong emotional love for music might instead choose to attend law school. The woman who has a great passion for teaching might instead choose the business profession, because of the market wage. A psychological tension between the person's rational side and emotional side develops, and the role as spouse or parent suffers as a result.

Those who are paid below the median income are predisposed to a different sort of psychological tension. The market culture teaches that a person's social contribution is equal to their market-determined income. The perception within a market society becomes that a person's worth is determined by the material “blessings” they possess. A market culture literally worships money, because money is an indicator of social contribution and thus, moral aptitude. From a Christian perspective, this association of wealth with good morality is the great sin of our society. See Jesus's statement in the Sermon on the Plain:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God... But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” [Luke 6: 20, 24]

Jesus spent much of his ministry preaching love for the scapegoats that society's traditional power structures blame for the society's faults. Jesus replied to such hypocritical scapegoating saying “as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” [Matthew 25:40]

The inability to provide materially in our culture can lead to deep feelings of inferiority and individual powerlessness. The belief in her individual powerlessness leads a citizen to place her hope behind a centralized socialist state, which creates a whole other set of tensions, that I won't go into here.

Markets produce good material outputs, but bad social outputs. As long as the positive material production outweighs the negative psychological tensions, then certainly markets are on the whole a good thing. And if the goal of society is to produce social stability, then maybe markets will provide solutions to these psychological tensions, as in Huxley's Brave New World. However, if the goal of society is to produce a full spiritual life, as the world's great religious traditions aim to do, then the psychological tensions would need to be rooted out at the source, and not covered up by medications or methods of conditioning.

Thoughts about equality

The average American will trade freedom for security in a heartbeat. A desire to maximize our lifespans, even at the expense of liberty, seems to be deeply ingrained in the traditional American psyche. The reason, I think, is that the assurance of long-life helps compensate for a psychological insecurity. Americans want so much to be thought well of. To be liked, to be included, accepted. (Notice this is the language of Facebook.) So we strive to be responsible citizens. We strive to not offend, to keep up appearances, and fulfill the expectations of our peers.

This is all well and good, but the problem is in the vast discordance between those we consider our peers and those who are physically our neighbors. It’s safer for us if our bubble of peers contains only those with a socio-economic or educational background relatively similar to ours. We feel secure there--even if it means ignoring our neighbors or the people living in the communities we pass by everyday on our way to work.

We live in a deeply fractured society. The distribution of wealth is nowhere near equal, but the greater issue is that we are losing our ability to shape our environments. Only 30% of Americans are placed in a position where they can conveniently enact changes within their community. These are the comfortable, well-paying jobs--doctors, engineers, lawyers, upper-management positions. These 30% are seen as “winners”. Another 40% of us believe we’ll be there soon--another year, another 5 years, another 10 years. These still believe and try hard, even under complete awareness of how much they hate current situations. The other 30% are escapists, having sought refuge somewhere else, somewhere other than the American Dream and economic promise of power and privilege.

So what does it take to reclaim our ability to shape our communities? What's the best available approach?

Permaculture is the idea that plants, and especially plants we eat, are an integral part of a sustainable culture, and that by outsourcing the growing of these plants to industrial farms, we are losing a potentially invaluable part of healthy community life. The social bonds that develop through the growing and preparation of food can bring great benefits to the psychological health of those involved. And here’s the great thing: involvement is dependent only on physical location and no other requirements. Urban farming makes it convenient for us to treat our literal neighbors as peers--to burst that bubble of distant but socio-economically similar acquaintances--and to reap the improved self-confidence and increased emotional support that comes from increased face-to-face interactions with those around us.

personality type theory - categorical vs. holistic thinking

Personality type reflects the extent we rely on words and the categories that words create. The Myers-Briggs system uses 4 categories. Why? The last letter represents how we make ourselves known to others. Those who rely primarily on words and the categories words create to make themselves known to others are called Judging, and extrovert their Decision Making function. Those who do not trust words and rely on a more holistic process to make themselves known to others are called Perceiving, and extrovert their Information Gathering function.

From there it seems reasonable to discuss the Decision Making and Information Gathering functions. Those who rely primarily on words and the categories words create to guide their decision-making are called Thinking. Those who rely on a more holistic process to make decisions are called Feeling.

Those who rely primarily on words and the categories words create to gather information are called Sensing. Those who rely on a more holistic process to gather information are called Intuiting.

Finally, what’s left is how we get our energy. Those who prefer words and the categories words create for their energy we call Extroverts. Those who draw their energy through a time of reflection and temporary retreat from words we call Introverts.

Thus we have four personality sphers, each with the possible letters ESTJ or INFP. ESTJs rely on words and the categories words create in each sphere, while INFPs rely on a more holistic process drawing from both words and the biological instinct.

For instance, I am INTP. I rely on a holistic process to get my energy (I), gather information (N), and make myself known to others (P). However, I rely primarily on words alone to make decisions. This is true, as I am very distrustful and skeptical of things in general, but demand a strict logical consistency of my actions.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance review

I think the following passage captures Pirsig's theme:

"A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly...
"If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.
"Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck...
"It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out." - Ch. 24, pg. 271 [out of 402]

Pirsig builds of this common feeling of stuckness--lost keys, test questions that we can't quite remember, computers that don't do what we are telling it, etc. The book opens on a road trip that the author is making with his son Chris, and John and Sylvia, a likable couple who also enjoy motorcycle riding. Chris is riding on the back of his father's cycle, John and Sylvia on their BMW. Pirsig knows his bike inside and out, observant of every mechanical nuance that might be a clue toward keeping the motor in top condition. John and Sylvia, however, both are "stuck" when it comes to technology (BMW cylces are known for having few mechanical problems on the road), and leave even the smallest jobs to a paid mechanic. Finally Pirsig comprehends why: "To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously." (Ch. 1, pg. 8)

Pirsig's book presents a theory about the source of John's and Sylvia's exasperation with technology and outlines the foundations for a solution. At this point I feel it necessary to issue a disclaimer. You may be thinking this book sounds like both an enjoyable and illuminating read. And for the first 100 pages you'd be right! The core of the book shifts in style, though it's not necessarily a change for the worse. My disclaimer: "This book was written for people who like to struggle with ideas." Pirsig, who also spent four years teaching rhetoric in the Montana and Illinois university systems, admits as much at this point within the book--"I suppose if I were a novelist rather than a Chautauqua orator I'd try to 'develop the characters' of John and Sylvia and Chris... That would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don't feel quite up to it." (Ch. 12, pg. 129)

Webster's defines a Chautauqua as: "a traveling show or local assembly that flourished in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that provided popular education combined with entertainment in the form of lectures, [among other activities]." This book was written precisely for those individuals who feel excited by the idea of a Chautauqua.

The rest of the book is more an autobiography of the author's journey through Western thought than a novel, although it retains many literary elements. Pirsig's insights continued to surprise me through the whole 373 pages. His main concern is the question "What values does scientific thinking teach us?" He comes to doubt society's commonly-accepted viewpoint that science teaches only morally-neutral, objective analysis.

Pirsig is not satisfied with this answer because for him, science is a means to Truth rather than a means to utilitarian application. Utilitarian application may satisfy most, but Pirsig invested too much in the pursuit of deeper Truth to stop there. To him, the near universal acceptance of utilitarian application as a validation of science, at the expense of the pursuit of a single absolute truth, becomes a ghost that haunts his whole way of thinking. "Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says." (Ch. 7, pg. 85)

The problem, as he sees it, is that there are infinite possible applications of science, and indeed an infinite number of truths that experimentation can prove. We treat scientific knowledge as an end worthy in itself, but there is no ultimate completeness to be found there. "It is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones... Science itself is producing the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate." (Ch. 10, pg. 108)

Science, when its end is only technology and no longer a meditation on Truth, becomes every bit as subjective as musical taste or religious belief. We use science to extend lifespans and rearrange the elements of the earth into any number of products for physical comfort or electronically-produced amusement in the same way that one prefers Beethoven over Mozart, or Catholicism over Baptists.

To avoid facing this inconsistency, Western thought has petrified, insisting that Classicism and Romanticism are mutually exclusive spheres rather than two approaches toward the same end. There's the "hard" sectors of science and business, which are ruled by objectivity, and then everything else--the arts, volunteer work, religion. In fact these spheres are different, but it is wrong to think think they have nothing to do with each other, and that the "hard" sphere should be controlled only by objective analysis. Classicism develops out of our social predisposition to use language--to learn the accepted name of things and conform to one's cultural grouping. Romanticism comes from humanity's evolutionary, biological need to experiment and experience until arriving at the behavior that feels most right. It is the interaction of these competing worlds that created and has the ability to expand humanity's consciousness. Pirsig is exploring this fundamental duality of consciousness through the lens of Western philosophical thought, using motorcycle maintenance to explain the Classical mode of dividing and classifying knowledge, and Zen, the Romantic holistic approach.

This book is for those who enjoy wrestling with these sort of ideas. In one of the more revealing autobiographical segments, Pirsig employs a quote from Albert Einstein describing an angel who expels the egoists and utilitarians from the Temple of Science. All that remain, "those who have found favor with the angel," are those whose "finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity." (Ch. 10, pg. 104) For these, I could not recommend ZAMM highly enough.