He must have been thirteen or fourteen years old. She was alone at home, La Bisbal d’Empordà (Girona). She had just come from school. After a while, it must be between six and seven in the evening, they rang the bell from the portal below. A vendor was identified Book club. I decided to open the door for him. I remember a very polite man, dressed in a suit and tie, with a large briefcase that caught my attention. He asked about my parents. I told him they hadn’t arrived yet and invited him in. I offered him if he wanted to drink wine. He asked for water. I asked what he was selling. The man, today I imagine him in a hurry seeing the lanky young adolescent that he had in front of him, told me that he represented a book collection. He began to show the catalog of the works of the Circle. I told him I was very interested in being a member, which looked very good. The dialogue was interrupted by the arrival of my parents. I remember his look of surprise. The silence. The embarrassed seller and I, happy as Easter, excited to ask my parents for the opportunity of becoming a member of that original reading club.
The seller achieved his purpose: a new partner; and my parents saw their son happy as castanets, because of the unexpected gift they had given him. There was no anger for having dared to let that man through the door of the house, just a warning. You never know who might be someone you don’t know. I learned the lesson. I keep as in gold in cloth those first books that, once a month, he bought in Círculo de Lectores. Among them, a magnificent edition of ‘The war at the end of the world’, the best work I have read in Mario Vargas Llosathe ‘Pedro Páramo’ and ‘The Burning Plain’, from Juan Rulfo and the ‘Stories of Cronopios and Famas’, by Julio Cortazar. A few years later I met Fernando Carro, today CEO of the German soccer club Bayer Leverkusen. He was General Director of the Circle and told him the same story. I ended up asking about sales systems and how at that time, when there were also commercials that sold encyclopedias by weight in many homes, it was over.
There have been and are more or less aggressive sales strategies, more or less effective and, also, more or less harmful to those who carry them out. We’ve gone from knocking on the door to sell books and encyclopedias, among other products, to thes nuisance calls -3:30 pm on a Saturday in August, for example- to our cell phones to sell any service. Telecommunications companies, electricity companies, financial entities, etc. These are calls that are usually made from a landline telephone, which begin by identifying the receiver and, on occasion, They ask for the DNI with all the gibberish. How to give it to him. Whoever calls, who knows from which ‘call center’ in which country, simply follows orders and their remuneration It depends on the number of people you manage to convert into customers or increase business for the company. The more calls, the more chances that someone falls into their networks.
Do these strategies benefit large companies? Who are the ideologues of this invasive marketing? A decision that, I believe, most of us citizens have begun to adopt is to never answer unidentified telephone numbers that come from a landline. The risk that it is a very urgent and important call exists; but we will have to start accepting it. They are collateral effects of sales that make us long for the sellers of the Círculo de Lectores.
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