Jan

18

Even when there’s no fine print, read it…

Filed Under Writings/Rants 

Today, I had an interesting experience. Something which I’m going to backtrack a little and talk about from a different sort of light than what one might expect.

First off, as folks know, I go to UCF and there’s a wonderful fountain that I’ve been going to in the middle of campus since August 2001. I’ve met many friends around the fountain and even formed my first band, Mindflux there. Yes, we italicized just the “M” whenever we wrote it. And yes, that’s me with all of that crazy hair, and I never took down that old webpage. Insane. Even still, I like going to the fountain because its relaxing and I meet a lot of interesting folks there. Be it rain or shine or even 40 degrees out, if I have an hour to kill, I’ll do it.

On Monday, it was one of those days. I had parked myself out there and nearing the end of my second hour playing, a gentleman came up to me. I’ll call him “Michael” because it’s close enough to his real name without being his real name. Well, the first letter is close enough. Even still, I never had met “Michael” before, and I saw him walking by once. He looked Hispanic/Indian–the country, not Native American–and was dressed very 80’s-esque with the jean jacket and everything. He tells me that he likes what he’s hearing, and that he runs a business. That’s where the conversation gets fuzzy. See, I thought he was telling me he’d sit down and talk to me about his business and this consulting group some other time, and I said sure why not, but apparently he saw it as setting up an appointment to meet for a meeting.

Tuesday and Wednesday, he and I played phone tag some, him more than me but we courteously returned each others cards. Now, I guess I should mention that he had my business card and I had his. I Googled his name, his phone numbers, and even the quote on his card and could come up with nothing for him. And we’re not talking some simple Google search, I’m the sort that I’ll put in any/all tags that I can, and if someone’s online and available to find, well, I’ll find them most of the time. Nothing at all for him. Nothing. Finally, Wednesday night when we set a meeting for Thursday (today) at a local Starbucks right up the road from me, I ask him about company name and other information. I’m a business major, and I understand the importance of coming to the table with everything that I can for efficiency in meetings. In a fairly close paraphrase to what he said “This is just for me and you to talk and see if we can work together, I’ll give you more information tomorrow.”

I don’t like being kept in the dark.

So this morning, I met him at Starbucks. A good walk for me, so I ordered my usual: a quint-venti sugar free vanilla latte with half whole milk and half soy milk. Try saying that one five times fast. Not typing, saying. Its good. Tastes a bit like its burnt, but it’s good, to say the least. Or to me it is, and that’s what matters.

We sit down outside, and he pulls out a brochure. On this brochure first of all has the classic 4 ways to make money (employee, own a store, investment, franchising) and then the classic supply chain model. On another part of the trifold, it has some information listing various big name companies. Companies like Sony, Disney, Office Depot, you get the idea. Big names. The “wow factor.” He tells me how there’s the company’s own line too. Starts talking about how mentors have made millions and retired in a few years, and flips to another part of the fold where it talks about two phases of money-earning.

Now, I should interject a few things here…
1) I’m a business major. Anything and everything he’s describing to me is stuff I learned a year or two back. I’m specifically a management major, and even if my focus is Human Resources, I understand this flow as well as the next person.
2) And you’re especially trying to explain to a guy who worked for Wal*Mart and for Walgreens how the big box retailers can buy in bulk and save money? Doesn’t work.
3) The whole while, I’ve asked the business they’re in, and he hasn’t told me at all. He hasn’t answered the key question that I’ve asked, and expects me to stay with him on this one.
4) And he keeps telling me its not a get rich quick scheme because they don’t exist. Matter of fact, I love the way he answered this one that I’m going to make it into its own paragraph…

You see, when he was starting to talk about how everyone makes money so fast, I didn’t blink at all to that. He asked me “Do you believe it?” My reply was very straight forward: “If Rockefeller, Astor, and Trump could make a lot of money from nothing, I’d believe it’s possible. Ways of it are out there, and just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.” Then, his reply was brilliant and I love it:
“I was born in South America, but I was raised in Iowa. I was offered a job in the Barbados and they told me that there were green monkeys there. I could have not believed them, or I could have gone to see them myself, but whether I believed or not, they were there.”
Yeah. Okay. And I shortened his reply, but that was it. Monkey are millionaires. Or something like that. I see the line he’s drawing, but I just had to not laugh.

All the while, though. Still no company name. And this makes me skeptic and wonder what I’m really sitting here for and through. See, I want to know what I’m walking into. Believe me, if I were to see a sign on a wall for a meeting to discuss the political power of the South in the upcoming election with free donuts and coffee, I wouldn’t want to just go to the meeting without seeing the group that was behind it. I mean, that’s a very ambiguous meeting right there. I could be walking into a rally for the Democratic or Republican parties or into a KKK rally. Power has many meanings, just as not being told what this business was had many meetings for me. And something wasn’t sitting right with me, but “Michael” I felt wasn’t a Klan member. He mentioned going to church, and again, from his appearance I’d imagine that he’d be just as outcast as this friendly Jewish writer is.

On the pamplet, though, I did notice what looked like to be a company name: “I-commerce.” I kept telling myself “I need to remember that, I need to remember that” throughout the meeting, hoping that the second I got away, I could hopefully Google an answer.

That second came faster than I thought. As we closed out the “information” part of the meeting and he kept insisting on the connection that he felt between us–something I couldn’t rationalize because he knew more about me than I knew about him and he wouldn’t relinquish the one thing I kept asking of him–he mentioned that the next step would be a meeting across town. Me, being without a car, mentioned immediately that I wouldn’t be able to get out there. He asked if I was between cars, if I would be getting one soon, and when I said no to both of them and answered proudly of myself that I’ve lived this long without one and wouldn’t be getting one anytime soon, he completely shut down and called everything over. In a kind fashion, telling me that if things change, call him up. But even still, he shut down. You know how it is when you’re talking to someone and you can tell they completely shut down and aren’t listening and don’t care anymore? Exactly.

We shake hands, and I’m laughing inside with a slight smile on my face. It was the dealbreaker and I found it without wanting to find it. I pull out my phone and Google it like “icommerce.” I come across a company name: Quixtar.

Now, I should be fair because nothing that was described to me was named Quixtar, but from all that I was shown, it reads like everything I’ve read about Quixtar since my meeting with “Michael.” Similar mentor programs, similar product lines and sales base. And it just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s legit, but you have to do a lot more than what was being implied to me. And its so close to being a pyramid scheme with the way the profits are collected that it’s under investigation still. Even with a clean Better Business Bureau record. And a lot of companies are like that.

So, I call back up “Michael” and thank him for the meeting and express that I’m sorry that my carlessness is “the dealbreaker.” He doesn’t want to use those words and says that if things change, let him know, and was polite, but didn’t really want to talk, I could tell.

And that’s where you have it, folks. You could say that I was stupid from the get-go for meeting up with someone when I had no idea what I was getting into in the first place, but at the same time, I was curious and this cat wasn’t killed for that curiousity. To a degree, you can find out more from some small investigative work like that, and I wanted my own answers.

That, and don’t keep me in the dark. Unless it’s about what you’re getting me for my birthday, because, you know that one’s coming up on January 31st…

And to “Michael” or any member of the I-Commerce or Quixtar whom might come across this:
This is the last line and I bolded it and underlined it for you. I know I was not clearly stated a company name, and I’m not meaning to implicate any company who wasn’t really involved.
This whole post is not an attack against your corporation/company/entity/way of being. You guys do your thing and it works for you, but the way I was handled in the shrouds of mystery didn’t work for me and you left me to my own conclusions because “Michael” couldn’t answer the simple question I kept asking.
“Michael,” I think you’re a nice guy, and I’m sorry that I wasn’t a good recruit for your company, and I wish you the best there.

Comments

4 Responses to “Even when there’s no fine print, read it…”

  1. Forrest on January 18th, 2008 9:45 am

    Hey man, you couldn’t have known in advance, but I bet you will be much more vigilant in the future, no? These fools with their pyramid schemes will never learn.

    For one thing, they’re all a bunch of liars. “You can retire at 35, and be rich on just 15 hours of work a week!”

    BULLSHIT.

    Let me say that you CAN make money in a pyramid setup, but you will need to basically devote all your time to it. Fifteen hours? Try sixty or seventy. And of course, there’s the added benefit that you lose all your friends and your family stops speaking to you, because you basically push your product/scheme on everyone you know.

    I’ve been caught into meetings twice in my life by people who wanted me to “Join up and get ready to make a lotta money!!!”, and each time, as soon, as SOON as I realized what it was, I got up and walked out. Sorry, not interested.

    And personally, “Michael”, if he reads this can bite off. He basically used all the secrecy and evasive answer stuff because he knows that 99% of the people he tries to peddle to (as he was doing to you) will tell him to take a hike as soon as he opened his mouth, if they knew it was a pyramid scheme.

  2. Adam on January 18th, 2008 10:05 am

    Me being the person that I am, I will give anyone and everyone the benefit of the doubt on something until I have all of the facts. The truth of the matter is in his green monkey story, as absurd as it is: because its there and folks have done it means that it is possible to do it, and maybe I just haven’t seen it yet.

    I think that there really might be some sort of legitimate operation out there like this, but the problem is that all folks who are any the least bit intelligent will see through it. Example I can give of that one is when I worked for the telemarketing firm, one of my supervisors had a website where he was selling products and turning profit. The “problem” was that the products he was selling were the cheap things that we look at and say “that’s just stupid junk” and wouldn’t buy anyways. But, there are of course folks out there who buy that.

    And again, I have nothing bad to say about the individual whom I spoke with. He was a decent guy from all I could see, and I can’t say he was an employee of the company that I named because he never directly named the company. From all of my best investigative work, I can attempt to connect him and the company, but that’s all I can do.

  3. aaronlvance on January 18th, 2008 4:28 pm

    Well Adam, I’ve gotta say, I have nearly been conned into the exact same thing. About two years ago when doing some christmas shopping at an outlet mall, I run into this guy various times in a particular store. Seemed friendly enough. We struck up a conversation, and before I knew it, we were meeting a couple times and I eventually went across town for a “group” meeting. I thundered him with questions, trying to figure out what exactly it was that they were trying to get me in to. I did squeeze a bit of info out of him. “Quixtar” …. “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” …. “Franchising” …..

    Basically, by the time I drove nearly two hours away for a 3 hour meeting, I determined that this wasn’t for me. Maybe for some, but not for me. Sure, I know a lot of people and could do really well at it, but it wasn’t for me. Seemed too much like a pyramid or amway.

    Anyways, i thought I’d share. You’re not alone. Sadly, a couple weeks ago I found out that i’ve got family that have been trapped into this and are still convinced that it works. Bull. haha.

  4. Adam on January 18th, 2008 4:42 pm

    Thank you, Aaron, for stumbling across my blog and taking the time to comment! I appreciate it.

    I’ve seen the pitch before and that’s why when he started into it as a pitch rather than just an informal meeting like he first suggested to me, well, I wasn’t happy. I know that I won’t know everything in this world about every little thing, but if I could at least know what it was before walking there, I could have saved both of our times. That, and he had also told me later on that he had a few meetings set up and was really busy, but kept insisting that he wasn’t making this offer to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

    The meeting I was asked to head to was only about 45 minutes or so away but with no car a lot farther for me, and I have no way of knowing if it is/was Quixtar or not, I just know that I saw the word “I-commerce” on the brochure and the only company that I could find associated with that was Quixtar.

    I see these all over the place. Sadly I get recruiting e-mails from Ameriprise or whatever that company is almost every other month. As a whole, folks are skeptical because of the pure fact that everyone is out to make a quick buck. Even if this is legitimate and you can make the money, because of all of the shroud of mystery they place around it, they don’t give themselves much room for their recruits to really make judgement on it.

    And it works too. As I mentioned above to Forrest, I worked at one time for a telemarketing firm and they kept employees on by not telling them the full truth. Me being the individual that I am, I used Google and pulled up so many stories and examples of what wasn’t being done right that they weren’t telling the employees.

    For me, I have too much of a conscious to just undertake a lot of these things while knowing “the real deal” behind it.

    And that’s not me saying that the folks who are involved in ventures like this have no conscious or no heart or no soul or are cold blooded snakes: they’re humans, just like me. They just have different scruples in their life, and I respect that. Takes all types of folks in this world to make it go round.

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    About The Site


    Thanks for stopping by, folks! My name is Adam J. Cohen, and I'm a guitarist/songwriter in Champaign, IL, recently relocated from Orlando, FL where I'm a UCF grad. Here, you'll find vignettes on my life, setlists from open mics and reviews, and whatever else crosses my mind. Enjoy!