The documentation of Cutco / Vector Marketing training experience as a college student (LONG POST!)
It’s a Tuesday evening and I’m driving myself home from college when my phone rings. I recognize it as a number I’ve been declining as unknown for the past few days, and decide to answer it and ask who it was.
I’m greeted by a lady who says she saw my application on Instagram and wanted me in for an interview. I have never replied to a job listing on Instagram before. Caught off guard and thinking like a broke college student, I agree and ask when I can come in, she explains the interviews are virtual and she will send me a link for this evening. She tells me to have a nice day and hangs up. As I’m waiting for the email to arrive, I realize she never told me which company she called from, I had to wait until I received the email almost two hours later and then look up the company by the website. Vector Marketing, selling Cutco, something I’d never heard of before in my life.
I got home and ran to my father excited to tell him I finally got an interview, and I gather my note paper and pens and wait in front of my laptop for the meeting to start.
I’m in a zoom call with 6-8 other kids (we can’t see eachother, only the woman who I was contacted by) and she has us fill out these questionnaire about ourselves, shows us the product, cuts a penny, shows us some videos, then has us fill out another form. At the end of the presentation she calls two names out and says we were chosen for a formal interview, I was one of those names. She pulls me into a private video room and asks me questions about myself, my situation, school, work, and follows all of that up with a very robotic “well, you sound like you’d be a great fit for our company then!” That should have even my first red flag. She then tells me that she will send me an address and time for training to start.
Training is two days later on Thursday/Friday. I arrive at the location only for it to be a grimy, boxlike pale yellow building with rusted green trim, and red doors placed unorganized around the perimeter. There’s a door on the second floor with a slide coming out of it that leads into a small kids playground that’s chain linked closed and overgrown with mold and moss.
There’s no parking lot, I park in the grass around the back and stagger up a wooden staircase, navigating the labyrinth of doors just to find the training office. She greets me and has me sit down while making small talk. The first thing I notice is all the cameras. Outside the building, in the hallways, on the doors. Second. The building is warm, humid, and swarming with mosquitos.
When everyone else arrives, there’s me and 7 other youths around my age. We sit through 4 hours of her talking, showing us demos, cutting things with these knives, and reading scripts before she lets us eat. As soon as we’re done, it’s phone call time. She makes us go through our entire phones finding “HM3s” (their target audience) and calling all of them to schedule appointments. I’m calling adults I barely remember and whispering into my phone that my job is making me read off a script and they just have to roll with it for now.
I schedule 5 appointments out of my 11 I’m required to have by Monday. She tells us by morning we need to complete a vision board and come back with 30+ names and numbers of people we can call, I came back with 3 and didn’t “win” the knife that the other kids did for bringing in names.
She makes us download an app, not off the AppStore, through a link. She shows us how to go into our phone security and disable it to allow the app to run, it restarts our entire phones and leaves them bricked for a good 5-7 minutes.
When it finally comes back on, we have to upload every contact in our phone, refer every single person over 18+ for a job (their whole name and contact info is shared), and she tells us to download WhatsApp to join a group.
We go through the pamphlet listening to her speak for another 3-4 hours, and now she wants us to read the entire pamphlet to a partner for practice. While we’re doing these demos the manager steps out of the room. I ask my partner what she thinks of everything going on and if she genuinely thinks this is a good idea, she expresses her concerns about the situation and I mostly agree. It wasn’t until I grabbed my phone and looked up the company into Reddit to see if anyone else shared the same idea that I was brought here.
As soon as I saw the hundreds of people sharing their horrible experiences with this company, I decided I was done. I stopped trying, wasn’t spaying attention to her, and was just waiting for it to be over. At the end of the day she had us pull up the apps so we can put in our bank information, and I put my phone down. When she questioned why I told her I didn’t want to do this anymore.
She tells me to follow her outside and explains that we need to discuss why out here because the other kids are nervous and if they hear me they “might get the same idea to leave too”. Every time I try and express a problem I have or see she stops me and tells me that they can “figure something out” or “find a way around it” and she tells me to think it over and try to get through the weekend because I might actually sell something and decide to stay.
I spend the last 45 minutes of the day sitting outside in the 95° sun on the phone with my grandmother sobbing because I didn’t know what to do. Was it too good to be true? Was the internet wrong? I need the money, but is this worth it? I pulled myself together, walked back inside to grab my things, and didn’t say a word to anyone on my way out.
I left behind my “sample kit” of knives, the knives I’d “won for free”, and a notes in the car windows telling them to genuinely look into the testimonies online and think their choices over.
I managed to snag my presentation pamphlet, which is something I’d like to share with you all. Every single page (except the contact info pages) is pictured, showcasing the manipulation they use to reel kids in, the marketing script were expected to memorize and present exactly the same to every individual we meet with, and all the the guided annotations she was making sure we wrote in while she presented.
If you have any questions about gaps in my story, about the pamphlet, or additional about my experience, I’ll be replying to comments.
TL:DR - If you’re a young person looking for a job, this is NOT IT! It’s a scam for you, your friends, and your family. It’s a massive pyramid scheme, don’t get caught up in it!!