An epiphany with help from encyclopedias
Way back when I was in college, before the Internet, before the personal computer, back when only businesses had electric typewriters, I sold encyclopedias one summer to help pay for my senior year. And in doing so, I had an epiphany that helped me understand the extraordinary and enduring tension in America between anti-intellectualism and academic achievement.
That summer recently came flooding back to me because the ingenious and ultimately fraudulent pitch that helped me sell quite a few encyclopedias to lower-middle-class families mines the same fertile insecurities that today, more than four decades later, have supported the extraordinary rise of for-profit education.
Anti-intellectualism is only skin deep in America; even the most aggressively contemptuous of academia realize that brains run the show. I used insecurity over one’s place in the meritocracy to sell encyclopedias then, and for-profit educational institutions are using it to encourage Americans to load up on student debt today.
It was the summer of 1968, and after failing to find work on a salmon boat (I got to Seattle a little late; the boats had all left for Alaska), I was lured to San Francisco by a newspaper ad from a publishing company claiming it was looking for college students for summer work as editorial assistants.
That was false. What it was looking for were fresh-faced college students to go door to door selling the New Standard Encyclopedia, which turned out to be a worthless set of books that the company had slapped together and cleverly named after the gleaming office building in Atlanta where they rented office space.
I decided to give it a try. When the New Standard salesmen first presented the pitch we would be using, it was so schlocky and so out of tune with the cool summer-of-love vibe that lingered in San Francisco—at one point the sales leader tried to rouse the group by yelling, “Let’s hear it for money!”—that half the 200 or so students suckered by the ad walked out the door on the spot. Most of the others left in disgust during the next few days, but those of us who stayed discovered that the script was absolute magic.
The pitch was based on the Collier Qualifier, a script that in different variants had been used to sell virtually every book bought from door-to-door salesmen during the heyday of such sales. It appeals to greed (the encyclopedia is free, you’re just paying to keep the books up-to-date by subscribing to its reference service); it appeals to competitive spirit (the offer is made only to “qualified” families); but most of all, it tapped omnipresent feelings that only education would enable a family’s children to escape the miasma of failure and mediocrity that was their parents’ lot.
How do I know this? It was part of the script. We’d ask whether the family wanted their children to get ahead; whether they thought their children were keeping up in a world in which the pace of change was quickening. We’d target those with swing sets in the yard, and it was even better if we saw no other books in the house.
The formula was to ring enough doorbells to give three full pitches, and if you gave three full pitches the odds were that one family would pony up the nearly $500 (over $3,000 in today’s dollars) for their “free” encyclopedia. One sale a day and I was making decent money.
Most telling, though, was the discovery that my best prospects had Wallace stickers on their car bumpers. George Wallace ran a populist campaign for president in 1968 that was based on Tea Party-like resentment of Washington and contempt for “pointy-headed” intellectuals who wanted to tell you what to do.
At one moment he was polling north of 30 percent, but his appeal evaporated over time. What those encyclopedia-buying Wallace supporters told me was that the surface resentment of the educated elite masked a deeper acknowledgment that book learning was the key to advancement.
Without the ancient supports for identity that religion, culture, caste or warrior skills provided before the advent of the consumer society, these middle-class breadwinners we targeted were left with an uneasy sense that they failed to measure up in our meritocracy, where, for most people, success is defined in material terms.
If wealth is one’s only measure, then almost everybody is a failure at some level or another. That unease is a perpetual source of pixie dust that scammers can use to sell anything related to education or betterment.
Fast forward to the present, where the wealth gap and the bleak prospects of the lower middle class have made that pixie dust even more potent (it’s striking that median household income as measured by the Commerce Department is actually a bit less today in real terms than it was in 1968, when vastly fewer women had entered the workforce).
It should be no surprise that for-profit scammers look for insecurities about the failure to succeed as “pain points”—in the jargon of the new sales pitch—to pressure women, veterans and the unemployed into borrowing many thousands to pay for bogus courses as useless as the encyclopedia I was selling decades ago.
I quit the day I was shown the actual books, which looked like nothing more than a shoddily bound set of magazines. I spent the rest of the summer working for Encyclopaedia Britannica. They used the same pitch. The magic of this fountain of wealth is that it taps a need that can never be satisfied by a purchase. Regulators might outlaw the most outrageous frauds, but the vulnerabilities they exploit will be there for the next generation of scammers to exploit.