Sales Compendium

Not long ago I called on a great corporation president, who is also the president of a great corporation.

“You are a student of human nature,” he said, “the pergola of pelludicity, and I want to show you a curiosity.” He pressed a button, and in about a minute a man entered. This man was past middle life; tall, spare, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal, with eyes like a codfish.

The president introduced us.

I was offered a cold, clammy mitt.

There was no smile of recognition, no attempt to thaw the social ice.

He was as cool, calm and damnably composed as a concrete post or a plaster-of-paris cat.

I tried a pleasantry, but it fell flat.

“What can I do for you?” asked the human petrifaction.

Just then, I glanced at the president, and I saw he was laughing behind a newspaper. He came to my rescue and excused the cold storage.

When the man had gone, he asked, “What do you think of him?”

“Well, he is not exactly effusive,” I answered.

“Why should he be? He is a buyer. Been here forty years, and has worked at the one job until he has lost his soul. His brain is a mass of mathematics, and his heart is feldspar. A buyer never cultivates courtesy. Charm of manner doesn’t count. Salesmen are decent, but buyers don’t have to be.”

“Buyers are inhuman, without bowels, passions or sense of humour. Happily they never reproduce. They are minus the friendly germ.”

“There is no promotion for an exclusive buyer. He gets where he is and stays there. This man, though, is valuable, but if he went on the road to sell goods he would divert trade from the house to our competitors. We couldn’t do without him – but all buyers go to hell.”

And I took his word for it.

And the moral seems to be that if you would preserve your brain balance and not devolve into a measly malamute you must do more than one thing.

Note #1: It’s not clear when this piece was first published. This version comes from Modern Business: Elbert Hubbard’s Selected Writings #8 published some few years after Hubbard’s death. Hubbard was on board the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915. Over 1,000 passengers and crew died, including Elbert Hubbard and his wife, Alice.

Note #2: Sometimes, versions of this piece can be found with the word Buyer replaced with the word Auditor.