UK Student Feels Southwestern Misrepresented Program
When I joined the scheme I was under the impression that I would be working in America having a great summer under the sun earning decent money. I was also told the whole experience including flights visa's etc would not cost much more than $2000.
Prior to my departure things started getting a bit dodgy. First my manager (Aaron) was incredibly hard to get in contact with and failed to get back to me when I left messages. This was also experienced by the others from the Keele team. I didn’t think too much of this at first; no one’s perfect. However it did create some problems. The date of our departure was rapidly coming closer and the prices of plane tickets were rising dramatically. Aaron never confirmed a date home and given the circumstances we decided to book at least the flight out there. We tried to find out our return date but simply were not getting the right information from our Sales Manager. As a result, some of the girls ended up seriously out of pocket as they had to cancel that flight and rebook another losing about $260 in the process. I chose not to do this as I wanted to see if I could get a cheaper one-way return in America.
Other information we found difficult to get off Aaron is the place where we were going to be working. This could have been due to the company, but we were still frustrated. Why does the company 2 weeks before we leave not know where they are going to station teams? That seems bizarre. The company has at least 40 weeks to decide this but only decides 2 weeks before which state we are going to be in. Only in Nashville did we find out which part of the country we were going to be working in. This frustrated us a lot because we had to book flights.
Upon our arrival in Nashville most of us arrived late on the Friday night, about 12-1am TN time (Friday-Saturday) for some of us. We were then told we had to get up at 6am the next day--bearing in mind we were exhausted from delayed travel, travel, and general jet lag. This I could kind of deal with, however waking up that early and only to stand around until 9am was frustrating. We later found out that we did not have to get up at that time, despite what our managers were saying. The disorganization was unbelievable! The hotel/place we stayed at was awful and the same price as a nicer hotels down the road. The service was awful and the breakfast place which I would say could accommodate 30 people absolute max didn’t open until 6:30 which meant a lot of people were unable to eat in the morning as there just was not enough time to feed all the Southwestern students before the beginning of the day. We were always under the impression we had to be at the HQ for the beginning of the day and guilted into being there on time. The sales school started between 7:15-8am.
The other issue with food that I personally had was that all the food was in another manager’s room. We were not allowed to go back to the HQ (the hotel in this case) during the day under no circumstances including on the book field, so we had no access to our food. The way we were treated through Sales School was just like a cult!
The rooms list was also messed up resulting in everyone having to shuffle around after day one.
Sales school was unbelievable. It was designed to brainwash us. Dan Moore (the top dog) would talk about "Mr. Mediocrity" who was a fictional character invented by the top dog himself and would come up and speak to you when you fail. Notice the subliminal word within the name Mr. Mediocrity (that being mediocre). You were made to feel terrible if you fail, that being a failure is bad and evil. The key to this company apparently is to do your hours (80+ a week) and demos (30 per day). Another lady who I can’t remember the name of would walk up on stage with a foghorn and said every time she sounds it everyone must stand up and shout "BOOKS = MONEY". I spent most of the week out in the sun burning. I asked on many occasions if I could be taken to get sun screen and a phone card. This never happened. The first time I felt able to ring home was when I was in Seattle because lunch was too short, or I did not have a phone card, or there simply was not enough time (bearing in mind the time difference). We were told to have limited contact with home. We were also told not to tell home about bad experiences or negative thoughts.
The Eastern European students had it really bad. One of my friends on my team was sat down for a few minutes just chilling and an Estonian manager came up to him shouting at him in Estonian. When he replied in English she then said "Oh you’re not Estonian?" and walked off. The Eastern Europeans are made to run everywhere with their 30 pound bags. I felt so bad for them as they looked trapped in this situation with no way of escaping. They’d be the first out working and last seemingly forced.
The flights up to Seattle were incredibly expensive. We were told at most this would cost about $65. They were triple that. This could have been sorted out weeks in advance again to minimize the costs.
For the first 2 days in Seattle we had to stay in hotels again consequently increasing our expenses. On the evening of arriving I was told by my OL (Ed) that we had to find his car and get another. I was told I would have to drive one home. Without a second car our next few days would be screwed as I was told. I was not comfortable driving without insurance (which of course is illegal). As it happened we could not find another car and didn’t get back till 11pm that night. On the Saturday morning we were on our way to begin knocking for places to live and had a crash. The brakes failed and Ed didn’t have insurance. There were 5 in the car. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the guy that we crashed into ended up going to hospital as he had an issue with strokes in the past. This car was a serious risk to our safety.
When we arrived in Seattle we had nowhere to live. Most of us agreed that we were under the impression (some had been told word for word) that accommodation with a host family would be sorted. This was not the case. Instead we were all dumped in various locations and told to go knocking asking for places to stay. I could not believe this as some of the female students had to endure the same situation but were left with no mode of contact with others doing the same and miles apart from each other. I’m sure in the UK door-to-door sales persons are required to work closely together to minimize risk. My experience through this situation is that I nearly got arrested twice in 2 days in the city of Everett. The first occasion the police officer questioned me big time and claimed that they had had 15 calls about me from the residents. She said she was amazed that I hadn’t been mugged for my money etc as it was an incredibly rough neighborhood. I was knocking for 6 hours. She ordered me to stop what I was doing immediately and to find a busy road and wait there for my pick up for my safety and the wellbeing of the residents of this neighborhood as they were getting worried thinking I was poaching for places to burgle. The second officer just simply told me to move for the same reason. After half an hour of knocking he told me they'd had 4 calls about me. I’m really not comfortable disturbing the public like this. One guy actually thought my story was so absurd that he didn’t believe me and slammed the door in my face.
We began working the following Monday selling books. Again I was in one heck of a rough area. The corner shop guy advised me to not work beyond 8pm at least. I got approached for drugs on many occasions. Met some incredibly weird and peculiar people! The crazy thing is I could talk for days about the types of people I met. Many of the people I met didn’t believe I was legitimate, or they were old folk not interested in what I was selling. The most frustrating thing is that not even a year ago Southwestern had sold in the exact same place! So what hope is there of selling to people who had already seen these books or bought them?
On that Wednesday evening we finally found a place to live. Some old fella that had previously done it years ago. Nice guy. However he lived out of town miles away from where I was selling. Thursday morning I was dropped off by Ed and told that I’m on my own and that I should find my own way home and get a bike. I thought ok. Looked on the map and I measured it as 11 miles. I later found out it was near 15. I could not believe that I was to be expected to find my way home and to travel 28-30 miles extra on an already exhausting day (13.5 hours). Even worse I was dropped off so far away from everyone else without any means to get back.
Here is part of an email I sent to Phil in response to one of his questions about what improvements could be made:
With regards to improvements, I am going to be pursuing Southwestern to get some money, if not all, back as I feel that Southwestern seriously misrepresented themselves and their program. Some of their practices are astonishingly bad. I was very upset, as were others, to know the girls were being dropped in foreign neighborhoods, distances apart, with no mode of contact, left to go knocking for potential host HQ's having being reassured prior to arriving in Washington that they would not have to do so. For the guys I still think this is putting them at a risk of the evils of the world. Equally I do appreciate that the risk could be unlikely, but surely any risk (particularly as Southwestern has been around for 150 years and must have come across an array of problems) is still a big risk. A BBB registered company would never put their employees in these terrible situations and take their employee’s lives in such a small hand. Most of the students have never been in the US before, let alone asked for places to live in such absurd conditions. I have personally been reassured that we'd have a place to stay when we arrived on our turf, but clearly we did not. I was not aware of the situation that we were going to be in, hence my displeasure with the misrepresentation of information. In the UK, I’m sure door to door sales persons are required to work in close proximity of each other in order to minimize the risk of their safety. Although there are several points I could make, I’m only going to make the 2 for now. The second is much shorter. We’ve been encouraged to work illegally. Without permits. I worked on my last day without one, pretty sure the same in Bellevue and my first day in Everett. Two girls in my Org were pulled over by the police for this exact reason. This is ridiculous. I know it is a small crime, but it seriously defies the student’s morals and it is a crime for a reason. The other crime I’ve been encouraged to break is to get a car and drive without insurance. That is unacceptable on many grounds which need not be explained particularly with reference to our first day’s incident. Other things to note are the recruiting methods, training methods, and morals, amongst others.
In a nutshell my whole Southwestern experience has been pretty awful. I feel that they have implemented ideas into my mind about failure being wrong and evil. Their definition of failure is to not succeed at the Southwestern program. I spoke on several occasions about leaving prior to my actual departure and found myself being emotionally bullied into staying. Upon my formal resignation to Ed he just turned around and said this was a shock and that I had not given Southwestern a chance. I feel I gave them a hell of a chance. I informed Ed that it was not about the money any more, it was about morals and principles. I do not feel that Southwestern has its best interests in its students. The ratio of profit for Southwestern to its students is about 2:1 in favor for them and yet the students seem to work, work, work, and do all the grimy hard work with little support from Southwestern.
Southwestern fails to disclose information to its students and seems incredibly disorganized on the simpler details and does not take responsibility when things go wrong. One of the fundamental reasons why students continue on with the program in these harsh conditions is because they are financially trapped. Students input a lot of money into this program who do not necessarily have that much money because they’re STUDENTS! I have lost a lot of money and would rather come back and work in a dead end job than continue putting money miserably into their back pocket. I deemed myself to be a confident person before, but this idea of failure has really affected this. I feel I’ve let down my family who has supported me but their skepticisms have been right about this despite my persistence to go against their better judgment.
I would never advise people to do this. Those who are successful are few and far between. Most of those experience incredible luck in finding HQ’s etc. Out of my team of 12 (including 3 managers), 6 have now left. Rumors also tell me that 24 out of 30 left another team. I really would like to meet all those who have actually had a good summer. I would also like to know the ratio of bad experiences to the good. They always failed to mention the possible bad experiences that people had in the past and the possible dangers that you were putting your health and safety into.
