Gadgets for the Home

After looking at least a dozen vacuum cleaners and reading and rereading everything I could, I decided on getting a bagged vacuum cleaner.

I chose bagged because bagless machines require frequent emptying. Every time you empty the vacuum, you risk kicking up a cloud of dust into your face.  This is not a good thing when you have allergies like I do.

So I went back to the stores again and reexamined the field of potential purchases. I spoke with more sales people with varying degrees of expertise. And I spoke with friends about their machines.

One thing that was very obvious to me was that bagless vacuums are way more prevalent in the stores. Bagged machines don’t seem to have much of a future in the home.  But there will always be people with allergies ready to buy a good bagged vacuum.

After much more deliberation, (I really do overanalyze things) and more Googling, I ended up buying a Shark Navigator.  I ended up with a bagless unit.  The infomercials were very impressive and the online comments I found were overwhelmingly positive.

Among the factors that prompted the purchase were that it had a decent length cord. Some vacuum cleaner cords are ridiculously short.  Cord length is not a good place to cut costs.  One of the big disadvantages of bagless vacuums is the expense of the filters that need to be replaced every so often. Navigator filters are cleanable and reusable. And they give you two so you can clean one and while it’s drying, keep vacuuming.

I bought it at Bed Bath and Beyond. Using their 20% off coupon which comes in the mail like clockwork, I was able to knock $40 off the price.

After reading the manual, I ran it over carpeting that had been vacuumed the day before. The amount of dust and dirt I picked up was astounding. The carpets looked lighter. I realized I should have gotten rid of that old Hoover years ago.

The dust cloud I envisioned when I emptied it never happened. When I emptied the Navigator’s dust receptacle, I had it far into the garbage can so the dust fell very far from my nose.  Emptying the Navigator actually proved to be a lot less dusty than changing the bag on any vacuum I’ve had before. Changing the bags was always a chore that kicked up dust. Emptying the Navigator takes a second. It’s easy and it’s clean.

So far I’m happy with the Shark Navigator.  I’ve been told that vacuum cleaners don’t last as long as they used to. This machine seems to be fairly well built. I hope it lasts. I don’t want to have to go through all this again for a long time.

By the way, I am not paid to write this blog. I really did do a lot of research and I did buy a Shark Navigator. It wasn’t given to me for review purposes.

Our sales training took three days for which we were not paid. Not everybody who started the training made it through. A few people quit because when they discovered what they were being trained for. I stuck it out because I had nothing better to do.

We learned our sales spiel.. We learned how to use the visual aids. We learned how to properly demonstrate the machine.

We were psyched to hit the streets and start making big money.

The pay structure is a scam. The customer isn’t scammed by it but the sales team is. For your first sale you get a $50 commission. Yes, that’s right. Sell a $2000 machine and make only $50. But the percentages increase as you sell more machines. If you sell four or five (I don’t remember which) you get a vacuum for free. You can sell it or give it away. Most would choose to sell it and keep the $2000. Once you get the free machine, you are back to a low commission (I don’t think it went all the way back to $50) and have to sell your way up the commission ladder to another free machine.

Our trainer entices us with the possibility of making big bucks because these machines practically sell themselves. He tells us we should be able to sell a machine at least 20 percent of the time. And we should be able to do four sales presentations per day so he says. How many days we want to work is up to us. If you work a 5 day week, that’s twenty sales calls. If you sell 20 percent, that’s 5 machines. That’s about $3000 a week. And good salesmen, sell more than 20 percent of the time.

The math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Sales calls are scheduled three hours apart, at 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 7pm. The sales spiel takes two and a half hours. Yes. If you let a Tri-star salesman in your house, you are stuck for over two and a half hours. And they are persistent and tenacious devils. They will stick around until they finish their entire sales pitch.

The sales pitch is so long, it only leaves 30 minutes to get to the next appointment regardless of what part of town it’s in. If you sell a machine, the customer gets the one you were using so when you leave, you have to go back to the office to get another machine and then get to your next sales appointment. It just can’t happen that fast unless your sales call is 5 minutes from the office.

Realistically speaking, it is impossible to make four sales calls a day. And those sales calls are dependent on the office people doing their jobs of getting you appointments. If they screw up, you are screwed.

Besides being long, the sales calls are high pressure. If you can’t make the sale, you call the office manager who talks to the people and gives them more sales talk. I found the whole thing uncomfortable. I thought I would get used to it though.

Here’s how they make a lot of money.

When you are in training, your first sales calls are “practice calls” to friends or family. And their reward for their kindness in letting you practice on them is to be subjected to the high pressure phone call with the office manager.

I had two practice calls. The first was with my parents who patiently let me do my talk as I cleaned up the den. They did not buy a machine. I wouldn’t let them. They talked to my manager and politely declined his sales pitch. He spoke with me afterwards and asked me how I couldn’t even sell a machine to my parents. When I told him I was planning on selling five and giving them the free one, he looked disgusted.

My second sales call was to a married couple I was friends with. They were not rich but they had two German Shepherds. In my demonstration I sucked up enough fur to make a puppy from carpeting they had just vacuumed with their Hoover. They were sold. The machine practically sold itself. I knew they weren’t rich and I practically begged them to not buy it but they had to have it. So I had to sell it to them.

Because I made a sale, I got to attend the next sales meeting. At that meeting, I met everyone who had sold a machine. Out of about 15 people there, 10 were from my training class that had just concluded a few days earlier. A couple had sold two already. Four people were from the class from the week before mine. And one person was from the class two weeks before mine. I don’t think they ever had give a free machine to any sales person. And if they did have to give one away, it was no big deal. That $2000 machine probably costs them under $200 to make.

When I saw no “old timers” among us, I saw the pattern and I understood the Tri-Star business model. Instead of just looking for qualified leads, they hired people whose practice sales calls would yield enough sales to make the weekly training sessions profitable for the company. It was sneaky, smarmy and exploited the weaknesses of the unemployed but it was also kind of brilliant.

They expected a huge turnover of salespeople and they were more than OK with that. The more people they trained, the more machines they sold to people who didn’t even know they wanted a new vacuum cleaner.

Upon seeing that no sales person lasted long in this company, I turned in my resignation. I wasn’t going to bust my ass any longer on what was obviously a road to futility. I didn’t make much money but I learned a lot about vacuum cleaners and shady business practices.

Many years ago, I had a job that lasted a couple weeks selling the Tri Star cleaning system. It was a vacuum cleaner but we weren’t allowed to call it that. Over and over, they told us it was a cleaning system despite the fact it was a vacuum cleaner. I learned a lot about business and a lot about vacuum cleaners from this experience.

I had my suspicions about this whole affair from the get go. The job interview took place after a 60 minute presentation given by the office manager. During that whole time, he never once told us what we would be selling.

The job interview was on a Tuesday. The next day started our three day job training for which we did not get paid. Finally on that first day, we were told what we would be selling but it wasn’t until Friday when they told us how much these things cost.

Even though they called it a cleaning system, everything we compared it to was a vacuum cleaner. We were taught how much better our cleaning system was over various vacuum cleaners. But we weren’t allowed to call it a vacuum cleaner even though it was one.

After three days of training, they finally revealed the price to us, $1999. Two thousand for a vacuum cleaner? We all thought that was nuts. But it wasn’t a vacuum cleaner. It was a cleaning system. Most of us had googled this “cleaning system” after the first day and we knew how much it cost. We weren’t surprised. We were still shocked the trainer could say it with a straight face.

The Tri-Star is a combination of vacuum technology. The air flows up the hose to a chamber in the canister. The airflow inside this canister is cyclonic like the popular Dyson machines. But it had a disposable paper basket to store the dust and dirt so it was sort of like a bagged machine. The cyclonic action kept the dust from clogging up the paper though so it had that over a traditional bagged machine. The paper dust receptacle was like a large cup so it wasn’t even closed like a bag. It was easy to dump out and re-use as many people do.

All in all, the Tri-star is a great unit if you like canister vacuums but is it worth $2000? Eh, no.