I was a teenage meat man.

When I was in high school I was always the kid that sat in the corner at parties smoking a dobie and watching everyone else have fun, metaphorically I was the kid in the back seat of the car, always a passenger never the driver. I was chubby with low self esteem and very shy, I was afraid to open my mouth for fear of making a fool of myself.  All that changed after graduation when I decided to become a “Door to Door Salesman”. I had a good friend Jim, whose older brother had gone to work for a meat company that sold “portion controlled” steaks door to door and he was making tons of money. It took all the courage I could muster because I had this huge fear of talking to strangers and an even bigger fear of rejection but I went for it and I went for it big. This was not your ordinary door to door sales, none of this would you like to buy a vacuum or some cutlery, no this was driving around with $1000 worth of perishable product in the back of your truck and if you didn’t sell it you ate it. Needless to say, win or loose we ate well, steak and lobster all the time.

            The plan was to spend a few months training around the Detroit area and then come out to the Bay Area and help open a new office. Jim (who had also gone into the business) and I drove our CB radio equipped cars cross country, traveling with us were two of his younger sisters, both of which I had the biggest crushes on. We arrived at my mother’s house on July 4^th 1976 just in time to watch the Bi-Centennial fireworks over the San Francisco bay. Now it was time for the fun to begin, the company called Arrow Meats had set up an office in an industrial park in Sunnyvale and it was part of my job as a “management trainee” to show new recruits how to SELL MEAT. As us skeptics knows so well, if someone is coming to you and trying to sell you something, it’s probably not as good a deal as they make it out to be and of course that was the case with us. Now don’t get me wrong we were selling a damn good product, fresh cut NY strips, rib eyes, and filet mignon all portion controlled to a perfect 8 ounces with all the fat trimmed off and sourced from USDA inspected packing houses. We also sold frozen shrimp, lobster tails and stuffed chicken breasts. I never felt like I was ripping anyone off, just “hustling” them into paying more for a product than what they could buy it for in the grocery store. The basic technique was simple. First we went door to door to businesses not homes. This gave us the opportunity to work a strip, contacting a lot more people and if we were lucky a business owner that didn’t usually do the grocery shopping. Next we did everything possible to not tell them how much the price per pound was. Each of the boxes weighed 9 lbs and it was stamped on the side of the box so when you brought in a box to show you always made sure that side was facing away from the customer. If they asked how much it was per pound you replied it was $2 per steak, if they did the math, 2 steaks equals 1 pound, $4 for 2 steaks, that comes out to $4 per pound and that’s twice what it cost in the grocery store back then. If they figured it out, that’s when they usually told me to take my meat and beat it. Anyway for 9 months I was having fun, exploring the bay area, going to the college of hard knocks, and selling thousands of dollars worth of meat each week. Like any red blooded 19 year old male with a pocket full of cash I spent my spare time hitting the clubs and bars chasing girls and even catching one on occasion.

            I had just moved out of my mother’s house and into an apartment full of rented furniture in Cupertino when on a sunny Tuesday morning I show up to work ready to pick up my meat for the day only to find a bunch of guys in suits with badges and “Cease & Desist Orders” from the District Attorneys of San Francisco, San Mateo, & Santa Clara Counties. It seems I was one of the few “honest hustlers” in the bunch; a lot of the other guys were totally misrepresenting and out and out lying about what they were selling. They were saying that the meat was leftover from deliveries to fancy restaurants or claiming it weighed more than it did. Turns out the D.A.’s had been running an undercover investigation into what all these meat men were doing and decided to shut us down. I don’t really know if anyone got arrested or fined because three days later the company had me on a plane to the Baltimore office and I was back on the street selling meat.  2 weeks there then on to New Jersey where I lived out of a hotel room for 4 months before moving into a condo with an alcoholic coworker who ended up taking me for $5000 on a business idea he had. I kept it up for another few months but got tired of the hustle, it was a lot harder on the east coast where everyone and their brother is hustling something. That Thanksgiving I went home to Michigan to visit my dad and just decided not to go back. I left behind all my belongings, a room mate, and a girl I had been dating. I left without saying goodbye and I never looked back. That may have been cold blooded and selfish but what did you expect? After all I was now a hardened traveling salesman who had changed from that kid who feared rejection to a man who didn’t care what anyone thought. Boy did I still have a lot to learn. 


To view the column in it's original form go to page 14 of the following link.Winters Express 2/17/11