Student Stands Up to Southwestern
I can't begin to describe how happy I am that your site exists. I went through Southwestern and the process left me in a state that took years to come out of. Imagine being stuck across the country with your only emotional support being people who keep telling you that you have to smile all the time! Thank you for this site, someone needs to speak out about how dangerous this company can be for young students. I could spend hours telling people about my nightmare while there. One person even told me it sounded like I had joined a cult.
Let me start off by saying that selling books for Southwestern is like buying a car, no matter how honest the car salesman, they are still trying to make as much money as possible. Just like your Southwestern recruiter, no matter how honest they are, they still have to gloss over certain aspects to sell the idea of spending your summer selling books door to door. There are a lot of things that are universal to the experience and have already been covered by other people here. The long lonely hours, cost of doing the job, difficulties/dangers of finding a place to stay and lack of any real support from Southwestern are a given whether you have a positive experience or not so I’m going to focus of things that personally happened to me.
Recruitment, where I bought way before I saw the steak – My team captain and the person who recruited me was named Heather. She told me that she was scouting for a marketing internship in New York and my name was recommended to her. At the time I was only a freshman in college and didn’t understand that opportunities like this are unrealistic after only one year of school. During this time, not only did I have many meetings with Heather, but she also contacted my mother and got her involved in the interviewing process. She had managed to sell my mother on the idea of me doing this. The whole interview process started around the beginning of the semester with her calling me to say that my name had been recommended by someone. She wouldn’t tell me the name of my endorser but in retrospect, she probably just fished my name out of the school phone book. It wasn’t until our bags were packed that she turned to our group and said, “By now, I’m sure you know this isn’t really an internship.”
Training – training last for about a week and most of it is to prepare you psychologically to only credit and never blame Southwestern for anything. You wake up at 5 or 6AM go through a day’s worth of training that can be boiled down to this: memorizing the speeches I was suppose to give at peoples doors, being told that everything is but I must do exactly what Southwestern says to be successful and hearing amusing/heartwarming anecdotes about life in the book field. Anyone who doesn’t agree with Southwestern’s ideas on singing every morning before you start your day or always smiling is told to get rid of their ‘cool hat’. That’s another thing, it’s made clear from the get go that you’re not allowed to show that you’re upset to other team members. I was told point blank that if I was sad about something I had to keep it to myself and only discuss it with my manager. Even complaining to parents was discouraged because it would give them the wrong idea of what it’s like out there. Plus, some team leaders like to call parents and talk about how great the kid is doing so if the kid is constantly complaining about the harsh conditions, team leaders have a lot of explaining to do. As for fellow book sellers, you can only talk about positive things with them. At one weekend meeting, I was feeling terribly sick with the onset of strep throat and could barely keep anything down. Still, I had two people bug me about not smiling or not putting on a happy face while at the meeting.
Disillusionment - There is also a lot of down play about the amount of money you could make, in fact money as a whole is downplayed once you make it to Tennessee. It cost me about $200 to go to training and I ended up sharing a room with six other girls. I was told this was done to get me in the right mindset to be cost conscious. Before, you just kept hearing about how people make an average of about $10k a summer; work hard and make about $10k a summer. You don’t get told how hard the job’s really going to be, but there are certain indicators that give me cues that things aren’t quite as they seem. For the first time I was told that there were people who only made 10¢ all summer because they didn’t do exactly what Southwestern wanted and that there was no list of willing borders. Southwestern stopped being promoted as a chance to make good money and turned into this character building adventure that looks great on your resume and can be used to make connections.
During training week, they start to emphasize the Southwestern experience as being more important than the money you make. I remember that our division had a sit down where our division head told us that most of the people in the room will not last the summer. We then split up into groups of three to discuss our individual goals. I remember saying that my main goal was making money because I really needed it for school. One guy pointed to the third member of our group described how his parents were rich and he was doing this to prove himself. I explained that I didn’t feel the need to prove myself to my parents because I have to make decisions that are best for me. In fact, this slowly became my stance over time because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had bills to pay and couldn’t afford not to make any money.
In the Field – The first few days are spent looking for housing. Up to this point, I was told that there was a list of people who had volunteered their homes and we just had to contact them. In actuality, there is no housing. You enter your book territory forced to live in a hotel room until you find someone who’ll let you stay with them. Searching consists of going door to door and asking people if you could either stay with them or if they know anyone who is taking in borders. Remember what I said about money being deemphasized? I think there are two reasons for this: 1) because a lot of you’re funds are wasted, 2) you make a profit by living below the poverty line. During the actual selling time, you have to remit your funds back to Southwestern and keep only enough to live one. This was made more difficult by the fact that you’re paying for you’re housing, food (my group was required to eat break fast at a local diner together every morning) and the meeting space on Sundays. For the life of me I don’t know why we just didn’t meet at a park or something, not to mention the money spent on whatever activities they may have your group do.
I know for a fact that Southwestern randomly assigns the sales area. First, I had numerous people tell me that someone had been in the area about two years earlier. Second, I’m black and they sent me to the one part of New York where they fly Confederate Flags and still use the phrase ‘Colored’. (In defense of the neighborhoods I worked in, most of the people I met were friendly considering that I was a door to door sales person.) Third, there were some blocks I didn’t even bother to go down because it was a hit or miss if the person answering the door could speak English.
The Bubble Burst – I’ll be blunt, the time I spent there was horrible. I could spend hours giving long detailed descriptions of how awful the three weeks I was a book seller was. The worst was when I got sick and at one point in time I said point blank that I was going to take the day off to rest up. The night before, Heather was supposed to pick me up so we could go home together. She didn’t. The only reason I managed to make it back to where we stayed was because sometime around two in the morning, someone saw me waiting there and called the cops. The officer was nice enough to give me a ride home.
The next morning I put my foot down and said that I was taking the day off. When Heather complained, I reminded her that the summer was about my choices and I choose to stay and rest. Heather told me that our division manager wanted me to work on a special half day schedule. When I asked him about it – right in front of Heather – he had no idea what I was talking about. I insisted on staying home that day and resting up. It’s only until now that I realize that in her commitment to always being positive, Heather expressed no real concern over my safety. It was the owner of the house who actually stayed up late to see if I made it home safe. Heather explained that if I wasn’t back the next day, then and only then would she have called the cops.
The End – I got kicked out sometime in the third week. There are three versions of why I was asked to leave, depending on who you ask. Heather told my mother that I was running out of money and had to go home fast. She told me that she wanted me to leave because she didn’t think I’d be successful and wasn’t developing the habits I needed to continue. What pisses me off the most is that when I was told to go home, I was presented with the ticket that my mother had bought for AFTER working a whole day and reporting in my times. When I was let go, under no circumstances did I see it coming. In fact no one in my group saw it coming either because at that point I was the only one making sales.
Later on I would call our division manager to ask him why I was sent home, he said that I wasn’t meeting the daily quotas but I think he just said that so he could just give me an excuse. This is why I think I was sent home: because I started standing up for myself and wouldn’t follow along quietly. When I asked Heather directly about it she told me that I wasn’t the same person she met and that she couldn’t trust me. The only thing that had truly changed about me was that I wouldn’t blindly follow her orders. The worst part is that all threw out the way home, I kept thinking about how I was a failure and how all of this was my fault. Later on I would describe the summer to other people and they would basically say that it sounded like I had joined a cult. Do I believe them? Yes and no. The only thing that keeps Southwestern out of the cult classification is the fact that you can leave anytime. I will say that they do have cult like tendencies in the sense that they prepare their book sellers in such a way that there is not room to be angry at Southwestern.
Okay reader, I feel like I’ve taken up enough of your time with this. Originally when I first started writing this, I was up to three pages on just the training/recruiting alone. If you want to know more or if you’re interested in having any questions answered, feel free to contact me at DangrGrrl@aol.com.
