‘We were brainwashed into working for a sales cult’

15 comments

1. This is horribly common.

   This story is about door to door sales, but many telephony sales teams have appalling cultures as well. Many teams are led by people who think you’ll *do anything* to make an extra tenner.

   It’s common enough that ,Iirc, a few years ago EastEnders ran a storyline about a young guy getting bullied in his job as a telesales person.

   One other thing that’s common, since the rise of the X-Factor, is employers who think they can treat staff like contestants on that program. “Give us a 5 minute video showing your talents” , “impress me with your next call or you’re fired” or , like this story, “line up against the wall in 2 groups then I’ll tell you which group still has a job”.

2. > 3 sign ups per day so 48k a year
   > 1.5 sign ups per day so 23k per year but only 18k per year

   So nothing mentioned on after tax for 48k? 12 hour shifts 6 days a week? And sign ups aren’t guaranteed per day and there are like tens to hundreds of employees? 25 mil revenue but field employees almost get 0. How is this not exploitation if not a pyramid? Is it a pyramid to begin with?

3. Anyone with brain cells would realise at the interview that these people are talking bs and they’ve watched wolf of Wall Street too many times ahaha

4. These MLM schemes have been across UK towns and cities for at least 10 years, I’m guessing way longer. I joined one many years ago for a very short time when struggling to find work and after a couple days realised it was probably a scam, since the same psychological tactics they taught us they were also using on us to make us want to stay and want to prove ourselves to them. Only wasted me about £20, but if you stayed there a month you’d probably spend around £200-250 on transport costs alone (buses and trains to other towns for 6 days per week).

   It’s funny how these guys are in suits, look like they’re doing well, are treated better by bus drivers (not that they’re usually mean), but are often making sub-min wage. I suppose you can extend that to office staff who make less than people in manual jobs, but look better off to people’s outdated perceptions.

   I’ve reported similar firms on Indeed, but I don’t think they take down the ads. Along with dodgy debt collectors that lie/threaten people, it’s one of the sectors that should probably be legislated against more. Though, if the government carry on neglecting providing or incentivising early-employment pathways for Brits, people who want to work but can’t anything will always take extremely shitty job options. Let’s see what Keir and co do.

5. I did an interview for an MLM and the guy “interviewing” me literally drew a fucking pyramid in front of my eyes. I explained to him that any job without a guaranteed income is not a job, it’s a freelance position.

   He left me stranded in a motorway service station.

6. In general we should probably eat the rich. But see when that great day comes? We should eat these fuckers first.

7. There has always been predatory people like this, taking advantage the young and naive. What I don’t understand is why they are allowed to continue to operate this way in this day and age. It shouldn’t be difficult to legally force, via legislation, these companies to pay and treat people decently. If your business model involves being an exploitative and narcissistic bunch of *****, you should not be in business.

8. Someone on Reddit called out this guy 7 years [ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/s/y3XXNaJt8K)

   Seems to be a motivational speaker/training wanker/actor.

   Also, Credico basically runs all the chuggers you see out and about if you needed another reason not to even acknowledge them.

9. Basically the same as the Cobra group, who then rebranded as appco. I did commission only door to door sales when I was 20ish. I made decent money, but terrible if you wanted to adjust it for hours ‘worked’. I had a laugh, but then again I was aware of the cultishness of it. I defo saw some people fall for the spiel. It was good training for my career in sales, but ultimately, I couldn’t stick with it in the end. I do shift work now.

10. What I don’t get is why douchebag can be reliably predicted from that particular hairstyle. Like, why?

11. I went for an interview and shadowed someone on the job around 17 years ago. I got the job. I immediately said I didn’t want it. It was selling random junk to strangers from a suitcase. I was 19 and didn’t know what the job was until I was there. I certainly dodged a bullet.

12. Yeah, I almost got sucked into one of these. They are basically pitching a pyramid scheme. You work for free and if you make a sale you get a small cut. Then if you get enough sales and join the cult mentality you open another location up and feed most of the money you earn to the previous manager and so on.

    They are incredibly predatory and should be shut down with the money earn being distributed to the workers.

13. I worked in direct sales for years, some good some very bad , great thing is if you get good at it then you can go anywhere and earn good money but for every 1 top earner there will be 100 poor earners. I sold vacuum cleaners and we were made to sing company songs first thing in the morning, I sold burglar alarms door to door , cable tv was worst , 6 day weeks starting my 1pm till gone 11pm for basically nothing. Best I did was selling gas and electric , getting people to switch to cheaper supplier. That was at the time easiest money ever , it was around 1999 I started, £25 a deal , easy 10 to 20 deals a day , I loved it . But as always some companies started ripping people of so it tarnished the whole business, fun while it lasted though . I loved it when I’d get ” not interested ” on the door . 9 out of ten I could turn around . Not by swindling or cheating just by good selling , will never forget a guy really aggressive ” NOT FUCKING INTERESTED ” I said your not interested in what? , ” what ever your selling ” said but I’m not selling anything, he says ” I don’t want anything ” I shout to my mate , saying Alan, what do I do now, this guy don’t want the free holiday to Spain. I start to walk off guy now following me saying , what holiday .
    I said I was trying to tell you but you didn’t want to know, he says sorry I do want to know. So we talked and I got it around that by switching his gas and electric he would save £600 a year . Told him that he could have a great free week in Spain on that saving for the same gas and electric as he paying for now.
    Start to finish 10 mins , signed up and another deal done.

14. I interviewed for one of those charity high street muggers years back.

    Whole spell about starting off, then run your own teams and they’ll expand and have people below them extra.

    It was a group interview, I think maybe organised by job centre, I walked out.

15. Had a job like this for a month, did it to escape retail.

    Was for a company called Gasbox and was outbound B2C sales selling gas and electricity.

    The training lasted for a week in a classroom environment and was a lot of fun.

    The actual job was absolutely ridiculous. It’s literally pissing people off all day and being ‘taught’ how to piss them off more.

    I refused to be coached over my low sales so was called in for a chat. I told them during the chat I’m off so I literally just walked out.

    My next job was in an inbound customer service call center which again had the training part, and the job WAS horrible but at least it felt like an actual job with a fixed pay and it wasn’t annoying old people for a living.