I wrote this book with the experience of having been a commission salesman in a number of different positions, in a number of different retail stores. I was a keen observer of events wherever I was, and very little escaped my notice as to what was transpiring around me; in particular, what it took to be a good salesman. That secret to the success of any commission salesman was, as crude as it sounds, is their ability to cheat customers. This was the sole reason store management hires the salesman and the salesman’s failure to cheat customers to the store’s satisfaction almost always leads to them being fired. The salesman is obliged to make his sale by “hook-or-by-crook” and to do so he will lie outright, distort information, and/or deliberately withhold information. He can talk out of “both sides of his mouth” about a product, and either extol its virtues or “badmouth” it, as it suits his purpose at the time. In this he is encouraged and abetted by store management, who will “rig” false sales in his behalf. If you are an honest person to start with, it will be impossible for you to remain one for long in commission sales. The salesmen who tell you the opposite are either outright liars or delusional, having long ago forgotten the difference between right and wrong in furtherance of their so-called careers. I never made a particularly good commission salesman because my heart wasn’t really into cheating people; I had the fatal weakness of feeling sorry for people every once in a while and sometimes did the right thing by them, even at my own financial cost. This misplaced sentimentality all but precluded me from being a top-ranked salesman. I did not mind it a bit though and was not at all sad when it was my turn to be “86’d” (fired).
The question to be asked is, are there any honest commission salesmen? Yes, probably a few, but I never met any. I suspect they are usually in environments where there is very little pressure on them to actually “sell” ; they are probably more order-takers than anything else. The stores they work at are typically in areas with little or no competition and those salesmen find that their usual “tricks of the trade” are not needed in an environment where the customer is practically assured to purchase because they have no other options.
A customer will usually only shop for mattresses once every 3 to 6 years and typically will have little, if any, useful knowledge about them, outside of some untruthful television commercials he (always assume he/she) may have seen. Pitted against unscrupulous store management and their commission salesmen stooges, a buyer has little choice but to be cheated, both on price and on the quality of the product they are buying. However, in reading this book you will learn exactly how the store and commission salesman go about cheating you, tricks you can use to defend yourself against them, and information you can use to make the best decision about what mattress to buy for your needs. At long last you now have the ability to meet the forces arrayed against you on more than equal terms. So read this book and you will give a good account of yourself against the evil empire of mattress crooks.
