door-to-door magazine sales crews

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/us/21magcrew.html

this article is several years old and i think i may have posted it once before but anyway, we've had these kids hitting us up every day this week now, it must be the season for it. the kid last night tried to beef up his sales pitch by saying he'd just been at director steve pink's house. anyone ever work for anything like this? do they come around a lot where you live? over the last year we've had maybe twenty of them knock on our door, usually after 7pm. they just talk and talk and they're always doing it so they can earn points or some bullshit.

yeah, they keep coming until you're not at home and then rob you.

what the fuck is wrong with your goddamn country?

I did this as a kid but usually I'd end up convincing my parents to buy subscriptions for the house.

the top prize was a chance to spend 10 minutes grabbing as many dollar bills as you could in a wind tunnel or something. I just wanted the sticky hand wand thing that you could use to grab dollar bills from far away.

looking back, I wonder how the administrators at my school sleep at night knowing that they let these parasites exploit children like this

oh I see this is for teenagers. well, that's even more strange!

men who missed their sales quota were forced to fight each other.

holy shit.

read the article yall its worth it iirc (hit: its liek a gang)

always wondered what the deal was with this, knew it had some scam aspect to it

A while ago out of curiosity and boredom I looked up the Reader's Digest magazine drive. I'm shocked to see that it's still running even though it's a total ripoff and doesn't really generate much money for schools. I never participated but I remember my classmates getting absorbed into the hype of selling $100 worth of Entertainment Weekly and wrapping paper to win a candy bar and one of those water balloon yo-yos. It seemed like a waste of effort for something I could buy at a party store with my allowance.

Man, I had a creepy experience last night. It wasn't magazines, but I figure it might fit in here. I had two guys in their late teens/early 20s knock on my door at about 8 o'clock. The guy who did all the talking had a teardrop tattoo on his face and said that they "had to meet positive people for school". He was waving around some folded up piece of paper and said that they had just spoken to my next door neighbor, making sure to mention that they knew she was a cop (which she is, and which I'm very, very thankful for).

"Meet positive people for school"? What the hell is that shit? Anyone ever have to meet positive people for school? At 8 o'clock at night?

I figure they were trying to case my house somehow, but I can't figure out exactly how.