Page 345 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

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HEN Al Handler, a student at Northwestern University, Evanston, decided to
make some extra money on his vacation, he elected to sell a device that
makes soft collars set properly. In his vacation period he earned well over
$1,000 selling them. That’s a remarkable achievement when you consider he
was selling a 25-cent item.

“This specialty certainly appealed to me,” declared Handler. “Wearing soft-
collard shirts myself, I recognized the disadvantage of the soft collar. It didn’t
look as neat and snappy as the starched collar. Often the soft collars on my
own shirts were messy, uneven in appearance, and in hot weather, wrinkled
very easily. So when I found out about this little wire device that makes soft
collars behave, I fell for it hard. I got a gross of them. I called upon men of
my own age at first, made a quick demonstration, and usually got their
money. Still, it took quite a while to sell the gross. Sometimes I wouldn’t
make more than two sales in an hour, and that wasn’t much, for on a 50-cent
sale my commission amounted to only 35 cents. It was plain that I had to
increase the number of sales, and increase them quickly, to make the money I
needed.

“I tried calling on pool rooms, barber shops, and similar places, often to find
but one or two men inside—not enough to step up sales appreciably. Where
could I go and do a better business? That became my dominating idea. I went
to a baseball park one afternoon, an hour before the game started. Here were
thousands of men. If I could sell only a few of them, I thought I could get
somewhere. So I talked with a couple of men in the grandstand, made a few
sales, then I moved to another part of the grandstand, and made a few more
sales. In that one afternoon, I sold a hundred and fourteen of these wire
gadgets to make soft collars set right, and pocketed $19.95 in commissions. I
called back at the ball park the next day, and made better than ninety sales.
The following day, I didn’t do so well. I next tried the bathing beaches, where
I was sure to find a number of men sitting around in their shirt sleeves. In two
hours I sold thirty-five, and left the beach highly elated. I was convinced. I
was getting somewhere. My problem, however, was to find some place every
day where there would be a crowd of men. Once in the crowd, I would be