My mother is incredibly susceptible to salesmen. You’ve heard the expression “could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” – she’s the Eskimo. I puzzled over it for a long time until I realized her willingness to buy anything from anybody is a function of her desire to please people and one of the biggest differences between the baby boomers and those generations that follow. They were raised in a high-trust society; we were not.
"If Jim down the street sells vacuums, of course, you’ll buy one from him. He’s always been a good, honest man and a good neighbor. You can trust him, and you want him to be successful. He wants business but doesn’t want to upset the neighbors; he needs to do a good job for them with sales and service. This is the backbone of a high-trust society. People know each other. If you meet somebody new, he’s likely to just be a local resident you haven’t met yet or a potential friend."
Reading that was a bit spooky for me, since there was a vacuum sales and repair shop/used bookstore run by a man named Jim in my town. He just died last year, and it was a big blow, because he was one of the best people I've ever known. He looked a bit like Mr. Rogers, and had the same type of gentle, soft-spoken demeanor. I used to love to go to his shop and have conversations with him while I would look through the used books he had in one section of the store and he would work on vacuum cleaners. I knew him from the time I was about 6 years old onward. Everyone knew and loved him, even the Mayor, who came into the shop one day while I was there. He would walk everywhere he needed to go unless it was raining, and, in his 70s, was more fit than many people in their 30s. I never knew that he had been a Vietnam veteran until I read his obituary.
"Contrast this to the post-Gen X experience of sales, where salesmen are viewed more like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: conniving tricksters who will con you out of your money if you aren’t careful."
That's been the case for quite a while with certain types of salesmen. If you watch a lot of 1930s-1940s movies (as I have), there are a lot of portrayals of door-to-door salesmen being smarmy and conniving, or, even more commonly, annoying pests who don't take no for an answer. There are innumerable scenes of people opening the door, seeing a salesman, and slamming the door after quickly saying "we don't want any."
Some movies featured traveling salesman protagonists, but even those usually had a running gag in which the protagonist would get a bunch of doors slammed in his face because people saw salesman as a nuisance. (This reminds me: I highly recommend the Red Skelton movie "The Fuller Brush Man" (1948). The whole movie is good, but the final act is some of the best slapstick comedy - and best stuntwork - that I have ever seen. There's also a pretty good sequel called "The Fuller Brush Girl" starring Lucille Ball.)
Starting around the 1920s, there also used to be a bunch of dirty jokes about Fuller Brush Men seducing farmer's daughters, the implication being that they were slimy city-slickers that couldn't be trusted.
Used car salesmen have had a reputation for dishonesty for many decades. There was even a 1961 episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Whole Truth" that used this archetype to great effect. The hit 1960s song "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" was inspired by a well-known joke about used car salesmen selling cars with a lot of milage on them by lying that the previous owner was a "little old lady from Pasadena who only drove it to church on Sundays."
I think that the common denominator was that most of these depictions were set in large cities (where people are often not closely connected to people not from their neighborhood), or were about people from big cities going to the country were they were strangers (as in the Fuller Brush Man/farmer's daughter jokes). They generally were not about salesmen in small towns selling things to their fellow townsfolk. Then again, there are exceptions, such as Mr. Haney on "Green Acres" (1965-1971), an extremely conniving salesman who would swindle his fellow residents of the small rural town Hooterville.
All of these are fictional portrayals of course, but trends in fiction tend to reflect beliefs or stereotypes that are held by many people in the culture at large.
"My mother is incredibly susceptible to salesmen. You’ve heard the expression “could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” – she’s the Eskimo."
My favorite actress, Glenda Farrell (who was born in 1901 and had her heyday in the 1930s) reportedly owned three vacuum cleaners and several sets of encyclopedias because she couldn’t say no to salespeople. In her case, the reason was that in the 1920s, she was poor and had to work during the day as a saleslady and a night in an artificial flower factory, so she understood firsthand how hard it can be to make a living in sales.
That's a good point about the cities and I agree - one thing we forget about art is that it is metropolitan and thus tends to reflect the attitudes of the city more than other groups.
Walt Disney understood this, which is why the Disney Nostalgia he wanted to create in the 50s/60s was centered around "small town" feelings like "Main Street USA." Even back then people wanted to remember what it was like to have a small, intimate community of interconnected businesses rather than a faceless metropolis of industry. He knew the visitors to his parks didn't want to feel like they were in Los Angeles (where they actually were).
One reason scamers target the elderly is that they grew up in a high trust society. Even in many large cities we used to have the vestiges of a high trust society. I am old enough to recall a time when you could fill up your tank with gas, and go in to pay afterwards. This would be unthinkable today. This slow decades long decline in trust has sped up exponentially in the last two or three years and the costs are much more than just economic. My grocery store has eliminated the convenient hand baskets to carry your items in because they facilitated theft. If my children need to use the restroom I must hunt down one of the staff to give me the code to the lock on the bathroom door. If I want to purchase some items from our Walmart, I must locate someone to unlock the cabinet where they are displayed. I don't live in a bad part of town mind you. Sadly, things are going to get much worse.
"If Jim down the street sells vacuums, of course, you’ll buy one from him. He’s always been a good, honest man and a good neighbor. You can trust him, and you want him to be successful. He wants business but doesn’t want to upset the neighbors; he needs to do a good job for them with sales and service. This is the backbone of a high-trust society. People know each other. If you meet somebody new, he’s likely to just be a local resident you haven’t met yet or a potential friend."
Reading that was a bit spooky for me, since there was a vacuum sales and repair shop/used bookstore run by a man named Jim in my town. He just died last year, and it was a big blow, because he was one of the best people I've ever known. He looked a bit like Mr. Rogers, and had the same type of gentle, soft-spoken demeanor. I used to love to go to his shop and have conversations with him while I would look through the used books he had in one section of the store and he would work on vacuum cleaners. I knew him from the time I was about 6 years old onward. Everyone knew and loved him, even the Mayor, who came into the shop one day while I was there. He would walk everywhere he needed to go unless it was raining, and, in his 70s, was more fit than many people in their 30s. I never knew that he had been a Vietnam veteran until I read his obituary.
"Contrast this to the post-Gen X experience of sales, where salesmen are viewed more like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: conniving tricksters who will con you out of your money if you aren’t careful."
That's been the case for quite a while with certain types of salesmen. If you watch a lot of 1930s-1940s movies (as I have), there are a lot of portrayals of door-to-door salesmen being smarmy and conniving, or, even more commonly, annoying pests who don't take no for an answer. There are innumerable scenes of people opening the door, seeing a salesman, and slamming the door after quickly saying "we don't want any."
Some movies featured traveling salesman protagonists, but even those usually had a running gag in which the protagonist would get a bunch of doors slammed in his face because people saw salesman as a nuisance. (This reminds me: I highly recommend the Red Skelton movie "The Fuller Brush Man" (1948). The whole movie is good, but the final act is some of the best slapstick comedy - and best stuntwork - that I have ever seen. There's also a pretty good sequel called "The Fuller Brush Girl" starring Lucille Ball.)
Starting around the 1920s, there also used to be a bunch of dirty jokes about Fuller Brush Men seducing farmer's daughters, the implication being that they were slimy city-slickers that couldn't be trusted.
Used car salesmen have had a reputation for dishonesty for many decades. There was even a 1961 episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Whole Truth" that used this archetype to great effect. The hit 1960s song "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" was inspired by a well-known joke about used car salesmen selling cars with a lot of milage on them by lying that the previous owner was a "little old lady from Pasadena who only drove it to church on Sundays."
I think that the common denominator was that most of these depictions were set in large cities (where people are often not closely connected to people not from their neighborhood), or were about people from big cities going to the country were they were strangers (as in the Fuller Brush Man/farmer's daughter jokes). They generally were not about salesmen in small towns selling things to their fellow townsfolk. Then again, there are exceptions, such as Mr. Haney on "Green Acres" (1965-1971), an extremely conniving salesman who would swindle his fellow residents of the small rural town Hooterville.
All of these are fictional portrayals of course, but trends in fiction tend to reflect beliefs or stereotypes that are held by many people in the culture at large.
"My mother is incredibly susceptible to salesmen. You’ve heard the expression “could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” – she’s the Eskimo."
My favorite actress, Glenda Farrell (who was born in 1901 and had her heyday in the 1930s) reportedly owned three vacuum cleaners and several sets of encyclopedias because she couldn’t say no to salespeople. In her case, the reason was that in the 1920s, she was poor and had to work during the day as a saleslady and a night in an artificial flower factory, so she understood firsthand how hard it can be to make a living in sales.
That's a good point about the cities and I agree - one thing we forget about art is that it is metropolitan and thus tends to reflect the attitudes of the city more than other groups.
Walt Disney understood this, which is why the Disney Nostalgia he wanted to create in the 50s/60s was centered around "small town" feelings like "Main Street USA." Even back then people wanted to remember what it was like to have a small, intimate community of interconnected businesses rather than a faceless metropolis of industry. He knew the visitors to his parks didn't want to feel like they were in Los Angeles (where they actually were).
One reason scamers target the elderly is that they grew up in a high trust society. Even in many large cities we used to have the vestiges of a high trust society. I am old enough to recall a time when you could fill up your tank with gas, and go in to pay afterwards. This would be unthinkable today. This slow decades long decline in trust has sped up exponentially in the last two or three years and the costs are much more than just economic. My grocery store has eliminated the convenient hand baskets to carry your items in because they facilitated theft. If my children need to use the restroom I must hunt down one of the staff to give me the code to the lock on the bathroom door. If I want to purchase some items from our Walmart, I must locate someone to unlock the cabinet where they are displayed. I don't live in a bad part of town mind you. Sadly, things are going to get much worse.