students to sell books door to door during their summers? I was curious if anyone had stories to relate.
I learned about this through an interesting thread on another forum:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2503040&perpage=40&pagenumber=1Here's their website:
http://www.southwestern.com/Apparently students are recruited as "independent contractors" (i.e. no salary or benefits), buy the books from the company (company assumes no risk and profits as soon as the "contractor" is enrolled) and spends long hour days trying to sell the stuff, and the student only collects their payment at the end of the summer.
It sounds like a multilevel marketing scheme, where the company primarily profits from enrolling drones, and the actual quality and sales of the product to end users is secondary. Students are apparently lured with a sales pitch that initially says little or nothing about the actual activity (selling books door to door) but paints it as a prestigious internship of some type, and hypes extreme big sales figures numbers that maybe a few people ever attain.
The concern in the forum I read was that the company seemed to, in the case of the poster's girlfriend, to employ cult like tactics of peer pressure, sleep deprivation and long hours, constant indoctrination, and isolation from support and family with their "contractors". The problem in this case is acute since she was recruited from the U.K. to come to the U.S. to sell this stuff, parents were duped into signing a contract saying they owed the company a thousand bucks if she quit early (not sure how enforceable that would be if push came to shove), and I would imagine a poor student with no money and no means of getting any aside from selling this stuff to buy a plane ticket back would feel pretty vulnerable and isolated and beholden to the company.
Here's a USA Today article about it, of note is that Republicans Ken Starr and Gov Rick Perry of TX have pimped their wares as summer students:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-07-19-college-work-usat_x.htm