On Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:15:12 -0400, Stormin Mormon
wrote:

On 8/22/2014 8:01 AM, trader_4 wrote:
On Friday, August 22, 2014 1:24:15 AM UTC-4, Pico Rico wrote:

what homeowner in his right mind would want anything to do with this?

I agree, probably not many. You might snag the few that think they
will be selling in the not too distant future, if the commission wasn't
7% and the real estate firm were known, competent, respected, etc.
But I doubt a firm that meets that last criteria would be doing this
to begin with. I wonder what the gift cards are exactly? Could be
$300 at someplace few people give a crap about, or could be $300 VISA
card. Big difference, but it still has the big problems.

They don't by chance require your friend to pay for the cards himself,
upfront, until he sells them, do they?


To offer people cash TODAY for a promise tomorrow,
that's worked on a lot of people. Might work.
If I was selling the cards, I'd want some kind
of assurance, I wasn't wasting all my time and
someone else keeps the money.

When I was a teenager, I had a job canvassing for alumimum siding and
other home repairs. I was a Fuller Brush Man making about a dollar an
hour when he recruited me. (A dollar an hour wasn't bad then for a
summer job.) I gave him my number and he called when I was at work.
My mother answered. She insisted on a base salary and a commission on
any job he got because of me.

As frustrating as it was, I worked 8 hours a day, except I think one
day, 5 hours in, someone told me that they were going to tear down the
whole neighborhood for an expressway. It would have been nice if
someone else had told me earlier.

I didn't get any enthusiastic leads, but I gave him the names and
addresses of a few unenthusiastic people. When the job was over, after
4 days or a week, I went back to all of them to see if they had
contracted for work. No one had. Then he didnt' want to pay the base
salary, about a dollar an hour iirc, so I said, Let's talk to your boss.

So we did, and I'll give him credit, he didn't lie at all when we talked
to his boss, and the boss said he had to pay me, maybe 32 dollars, maybe
29 for the short day (I forget if Iworked elswhere or what I did after I
left the soon-to-be-destroyed n'hood. Funny though, I knew the
boss's name and my mother was probably friends with his wife. I did
not bring that up however. Trying not to rely on my mother entirely.

Went back to being a Fuller Brush man.

I'm suspicious. Too many ways to work like a dog
and invest a load of your own money and get zero
for your efforts.

I think he was offered a base salary too, but I might be mixed up with
another job possibility.

30 a week, x 30 each x 50 weeks a year would be 45,000 a year. He
doesn't expect that much. He lives on much less, no car, no wife, no
children, for exaample, but he looks every day but hasn't had a job for
6 months, maybe it's 8 months by now.

He already turned down one job where he thought they were liars. He was
supposed to get prospects, for what I forget, and tell them, Be sure to
ask for me, Joe, when you get here. But the prospective boss told him
that they never refer people to the person they had already talked to.
He could have taken the job and just not told them to ask for him, so no
lying on his part, and the boss would probably never know, but he
thought anything that depended on his lying at their instruction was no
place to work, even if he himself got paid, and I agree with him.

Those of you, not you Stormin or Trader or Ed, who snickered at his
plight, I wonder what you would consider if you were out of work for 8
months.