Vector Marketing: a scam?

Any sales system that makes you purchase a starting investment and then has you recruit other people as your own distributors in order to make a profit is a pyramid scheme that is fundamentally unsound. Even if it is not strictly illegal, it is extremely shady and not something any person should want to be associated with. It's no better than Mary Kay.

Corroborating everything said here (got several offers from them a while back). Cut and run while you can.

edited 6th Jun '11 9:34:32 AM by Pykrete

Let me adjust my earlier statement. Any sales "job" that has you spend money to get into it is a scam, period, full stop, fin.

Of course, you could always use it as a way to get the knives for cheap.

You can get better knives for less.

Eh, got me a fifty year old one that still cuts from the company.

My wife actually worked as a Cutco sale rep for a bit. I like their products, and since she was a rep, we got almost a full set for a real nice discount. You don't need a full set of their stuff, though; just a few of their basic items will do just about anything in the kitchen you could think of.

Of course, there are other brands of cultlery that will do just as well.

But she's not exactly sales rep material, so she quit after awhile; she was in it mostly so we could score the product for cheap (like Deboss mentioned).

edited 6th Jun '11 3:36:41 PM by pvtnum11

I kept my starter set and never went back. Worst job in my life. I've done jobs for free that were more rewarding than getting paid to sell those things.

the only good thing i can say about them is that they actually have real product to sell.

I get the feeling that the majority of their sales consist of the "demo set" they sell to the people they hire, though.

I worked for them for a summer. They're really not a scam, if you're a good salesman you can make a lot of money and make a good career out of it. I was just a wicked shitty salesman and hated the work, so I quit.

I've never heard of them, but they sound shady.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing

edited 7th Jun '11 6:15:52 AM by Fighteer

Don't all companies do that?

Yeah, really. Most companies want you to drink the flavor-aid that they're the bestest thing to happen to you (the employee) since sliced bread, and become a "company (wo)man", however that applies to you.

edited 7th Jun '11 1:16:42 PM by pvtnum11

Actually, that hasn't been my experience at all. Companies want your loyalty, but they don't go out of their way to go "We are the best thing evar and you must evangelize us to your family and disown anyone who talks badly of us."

Guess it depends on the company. When they have mandatory bonus fun-time that you HAVE to attend... it comes off as annoying.

I'd definitely say that it isn't a scam. Especially since their sample kits are now loaned to the employees. No payment of any kind is necessary upon hiring.

My boss turned off the lights and set his desk on fire while making a long analogy about "starting fires in ourselves" and pushing sales right before July 4th weekend. On weekends, he routinely got a lot of the underaged employees trashed at his apartment and made us feel like close friends and the coolest high schoolers ever. Pretty sure he was nailing the one 16-year-old sales rep girl, too. The receptionist dressed extremely suggestively for the job and frequently flirted physically with the teenaged applicants to get them to sign up and keep coming back with sales. They used intense peer pressure, groupthink, and shame to force us into dozens of appointments with people we hardly knew.

We were sweet-talked and emotionally manipulated like drunken prom dates into dreams of grandeur and tossed aside just as easily when we couldn't produce results.

It wasn't until $10,000 in sales later, when I left the company, that I realized how badly I was being played.

I have gotten employment offers from Vector Marketing, even though I am too young to work for them.

In other words, stay away, stay far, far away.

Well its been a few months but since coming back to school I learned that vector has a new name: Workforstudents.com Stay away

I worked there over the summer, and I can assure you all that they're actually a really good employer. They're completely and utterly soul-crushing, true, but I assume that's typical of a sales job. I made about $10 an hour from them.

(I'd like to reiterate this: Whatever Vector's failings may be, they're not a scam.)

edited 10th Jan '12 10:26:10 PM by feotakahari

What the fuck ? I just got an interview with them today.

They said that they'd give me a base pay of $16 an hour . I know I'm gonna get hired,but first let me see how they work.

edited 11th Jan '12 12:01:05 AM by TheWesterner

That's actually a bit misleading. IIRC, they give you a base pay "per sales pitch" which is supposed to take an hour.

I don't know if you had someone else in mind, but this happened to me. I became suspicious when I was initially "hired," and between then and the first orientation, I did my reading and concluded that they weren't trustworthy.

It is, in fact, entirely possible to make money working for them, but there's no guarantee of that, and it's also quite possible to lose money. Officially, you're an independent contractor, meaning they have no obligation to ensure that you make at least minimum wage, or anything at all. To make good money under them, you need either really good salesmanship, or an extensive network of people willing to buy knives from you that they don't necessarily want, so be aware that you are likely to be trading the goodwill of your social network for money.