Ninja Wreath Sellers

I have never been a salesman. I just can’t do it, which is really embarrassing, considering the fact that my father is great at it. The problem lies in the fact that I can’t convince people to buy something I think is a piece of crud. I suppose that might mean that in reality I’m a pretty good salesman, I just lack a good product.

This problem of being an awful salesman surfaced a few days ago. We, as a class, decided at the beginning of the year to make our class trip to the Bahamas. For those of you that have not done much international flying recently, this isn’t cheap. Our plan was to pay for this trip by selling muffins to a small group of elementary kids at about 50 cents a piece. By my rough calculations, that would mean that each ten year old elementary student would have to buy about 600 muffins. The muffin market was really slow, because the kids couldn’t convince their parents to give them $300 in muffin money, so we moved on to other methods.

The most recent failure of our class has been the Christmas Wreath Scam, or CWS for short (the acronym CWS is also claimed by the Church World Service, the College World Series, the Canadian Wildlife Service, the Center for Woman’s Studies, and various malware trojans, but we can use it too). The basic idea for the CWS is that a bunch of zit faced teenagers (us) mount a massive telemarketing and door to door sales campaign to sell overpriced, poorly made Christmas wreaths at $24 a piece. We were desperate. My mission: to sneak up behind my friends and relatives, hit them over the head, whisper subliminal messages to them as they lay passed out on the floor, and sell seven wreaths (the above tasks could be completed in any order).

I brought a friend along for my mission. We both dressed up in full commando gear and headed out to the cold hard streets of suburban Massachusetts. Our fist target was the house directly across the street. The people that lived there were the kind of old people that were determined to live forever; the kind that shovel their driveway and rake leaves and give potted plants to everyone. With this in mind, we decided to try a peaceful approach at first. I took off my commando suit, leaving only the clothes of a respectable student from a private Christian school. My friend hid in the bushes next to the door, chemical sedative grenades in each hand. I knocked

The old man came to the door. I politely asked him if he would like to buy slightly smashed plain wreaths for $24 and tax. He smiled and said that his wife always made the wreaths. I motioned to my friend, and he tossed the grenade. There was a muffled “WUMP” and a thick smoke filled the house. We donned our masks and headed in. I knelt down to the crumpled form and began whispering “you must buy wreaths to save starving babies!” “You must buy wreaths to save starving babies!” The smoke blew away and he began to revive. “I’ll take one plain wreath, my wife will decorate it” he said.

We continued our conquest of the block. I selected the house of Mr. Schmitt as our next target. Mr. Schmitt was about 94 and was most likely asleep. We could dispense with the sedative grenades and go strait for the subliminal messages. I crept up under the living room window of the Schmitt house and peeked in. Sure enough, Mr. Schmitt and his wife were both asleep in easy chairs. My friend and I opened the front door and crept silently through the house. We snuck up behind Mr. Schmitt, not making a sound. Suddenly, Mr. Schmitt sprang from his chair! He landed on the ground, looked at us through narrowed eyes, then jumped and did a split kick, throwing us into opposite corners. As we fought for our lives and tried to get to the door I begged for mercy and tried to sell wreaths. “Please! Buy overpriced junk from us so that we can go on a trip to a Caribbean island, using the money you earned working for 50 cents an hour while supporting a family of six!” I pleaded. Mr. Schmitt snarled and did a butterfly kick, knocking me, senseless, through the screen door. My friend (who had wisely shut up) made a bolt through the hole I had made in the door and managed to drag me to safety.

When I came to, we conversed and decided that perhaps we should go for easier targets. There was an assisted living neighborhood on block over, kind of like nursing home condos. We cut across the well manicured lawns and went for the first house we saw. An old lady came to the door. Seeing two zit-faced teenagers in full commando gear, she pushed her police alert button. Within a few seconds there were distant sirens wailing, and coming closer fast. We made a break for the woods. We failed to remember, however, that we were in an assisted living center. After a brief search through the decorative shrubbery the police found us and dragged us off to the waiting patrol car. I screamed as I was handcuffed, “Buy Christmas wreaths for only $24!” “Send us off to a Caribbean tourist trap so that we can spend out college funds!” “Long live free market capitalism!!!!” The last desperate cry was drowned out by the wailing sirens and the slamming door.

Honestly people, that was a joke. I did, however, fail in selling more than 1 wreath to someone besides myself after a few hours of trying. In fact, I barely convinced myself to buy a wreath, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do it again, considering the fact that I only made $7 profit off myself. If you would like to support the SLA senior class of 2006, click this link.

Please add a note saying what it is for, the default for this account is, quite literally, to save starving children (private donation, I don't claim to be an organisation, but I forward funds to them). Eww, forget that. Just save the starving children. Stupid class trip.

Commander Keen!