Page 72 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

until he had built up a large soap inventory. His first week was a
disappointment. Most women, he knew, had enough money in the house to
pay for a box of soap. The price he asked—thirty-nine cents a box—was
reasonable for a box of soap, generally priced much higher. Nevertheless, it
took him two days to sell his first ten boxes, although he worked hard at the
job.

“Wherever I called I was usually given the same story,” he explained. “‘I
won’t have any money until Saturday when my husband gets paid,’ is what I
heard many times each day, and I’d turn away from the door, to be greeted at
the next door with the same ‘reason.’ On my third day as a soap salesman I
told one woman who gave me that excuse, ‘All right. I’ll leave the soap now,
and come back, say Monday. If you wish, you can pay me a small deposit
now, or you can pay the entire amount Monday. Just as you prefer.’ She
thanked me, and said that would be all right, so I handed her a box of soap,
wrote her name and address in a book, and went on to my next call. Here
again, I met the same objection in the same way by leaving another box of
soap. At the next three calls, however, my readiness to trust the housewife
brought out the cash, and by early afternoon I had sold fifteen boxes of soap
for which I was to collect later, and collected the full amount for ten more. I
was then all out of soap so I took all the money I had collected to the
company that supplies me with soap and reinvested it in a fresh supply. The
next morning I used the same argument I had used the previous afternoon
when women told me they had no money. Within two hours I left twenty-five
boxes, fifteen of which were cash sales. Again I returned to the company and
this time secured thirty boxes, which I disposed of before dark.

“When I called back to make collections for the soap on the following
Monday, only one woman refused to pay me. My profit on the sales up to that
time was forty-six dollars, so I could stand the few cents loss nicely.”

Fitze continues to use his “system” with remarkable results. Each morning he
starts out with a sack containing twenty-five boxes of soap, and along about
noon returns to get another twenty-five. Sometimes he sells as high as
seventy-five boxes a day. In one four-month period, he averaged a daily sale
of sixty-two boxes and made over a thousand dollars. By making about