One Last Post About How Much I Suck At Pledge Drive (Until The Next One)

Have you ever heard of Grit?  It was this "family newspaper" they advertised in comic books to get kids to sell door-to-door.  You can read about it on Wikipedia.  There used to be comic ads they ran featuring none other than Richie fucking Rich in which his father said they got rich because he sold Grit!

(I knew I didn't dream it.  I found this here.)

You can probably see where this is going.  As a kid whose family didn't pay much attention to him - whose mother was working most of the time - I thought, "Wow, if Richie Rich can do this, so can I!"

At the time I lived in an apartment complex & we were rather poor.  As were our neighbors.  When the first stack of Grit arrived - there were like fifty copies, a giant stack of newspapers, & I seem to remember them being a tabloid format - I made a very half-hearted effort to sell them door-to-door.  I think I got to maybe five doors before the whole process began to seem hopeless.  I tried a few more, getting weird looks from the people who acted at though they never saw me before, & getting no one to buy a copy.  I didn't finish going through the apartments.

Back at home, I read an issue all the way through.  It promoted itself as being positive & even the very young & not at all cynical me seemed to think that was a bit saccharine.  At some point my mother told me to take them to the trash, so I did.  & then next week another stack came.  & another the week after.  & the little envelopes telling me I had to send them money to pay for the stacks of home-town newspapers they were sending me.

What could I do?  I was never going to sell all those copies, never going to be as rich as Richie Rich's dad.  & I didn't have any money.  I was probably in sixth or seventh grade.  Maybe even younger.  Were they going to sue me?  Would they end up writing my mother?

At some point, the newspapers stopped coming.  Then the letters stopped, too.  They were entrusting children with their business, it wasn't like a newspaper boy who reported to an adult.  My guess it happened all the time, & probably more & more as time went on.  A business model from the 1950s was not going to survive into the 1980s.

(Grit still sort-of exists, but as its website shows, it's nothing like the newspaper with 'good news' stories & comics that I failed to sell in my childhood.)

But more than that, I came to realize that I was not designed to be a salesperson.  A different me could easily have tried to try more doors in my apartment complex, to walk up & down the streets in my neighborhood.  I am guessing they gave me fifty issues, it could've been more, but I'll bet if I had just tried a little harder, I could've sold half of them.  I lived next door to a shopping center, I could've tried to hawk them in front of the Minyard's.  But I didn't.  The initial rejections were too much for my fragile self.

The point is, I've been sucking at selling things for a long, long time.  & I'm sorry.