Press Release

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For Immediate Release:SAVE Stands Up Against Student Recruiting Business

Have you ever answered a vague but very attractive help wanted ad and come down for the interview only to find out it’s not a job ad at all, but instead is a business opportunity they have to take an hour or so to sell to you? A company called Vector Marketing has been doing this for years deceiving tens of thousands of young students with vague and misleading statements like “Customer Service and sales” work in “housewares and sporting goods” with “no door-to-door or telemarketing” for over “$12/base-appt” and a group called Students Against Vector Exploitation (SAVE) is getting together because they are not going to take it anymore.

Last year Lauren Katz, the co-founder of SAVE won a case with the NY Dept. of Labor alleging Vector to have breached the independent contractor- client relationship making her an employee, and Vector has sent her a check to compensate her work during unpaid training. She says “I know others can win too, it’s just a matter of standing up for your rights.” Since then Vector settled several other wage claims filed with the Dept of Labor.

Vector Marketing is a company that targets students nation-wide to sell Cutco kitchen knife sets priced between $200-$2,000 with in-home demonstrations. They are encouraged to sell to their family and friends to start out with and are pretty successful in the beginning, since it’s easy to sell to people that care about you and feel obligated to help out. But after that they must rely on referrals, which can be difficult since not too many people want to let strangers into their house to get a sales pitch on knife sets that typically cost several hundred dollars. David Tatar, a supervisor with the Wisconsin Consumer Protection Dept. was quoted in 1996 by the Washington Post as saying “that state surveyed 940 Vector recruits in 1992 and found that almost half either earned nothing or lost money working for Vector” and “workers in that state earned less than $3 a day on average selling cutlery for Vector.”

Vector workers are hired as independent contractors instead of employees disallowing them employee rights like minimum wage and pay for training or meetings. But instead of being their own boss as independent contractors are supposed to, they must follow strict rules as to who they can sell to and how to give the presentation in order to get paid if they don’t sell, and they must work under a manager often having to check in to the office and go to conferences. They must either buy or put down a deposit for at least $145 for a set to give demonstrations with. And some optional conferences they need to pay to attend.

Further research shows that they were sued by the Arizona Attorney General in 1990, ordered by the states of Wisconsin and Oregon not to deceive it’s recruits in 1994, and sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 1999. Each time their legal trouble revolved around fraudulent recruiting tactics and each time they settled and promised not to mislead their recruits anymore. The Toronto Star wrote an article about fraudulent job advertising in 1994 and wrote that they decided not to run Vector’s ads anymore. Lewis & Clark’s college student newspaper in Oregon wrote an article in 1997 calling the company a scam and interviewed a receptionist alleging she was told to deceive students over the phone. The Salem Statesman Journal wrote this summer that the Oregon Attorney General is investigating complaints made about Vector and may take action. SAVE doesn’t believe they have cleaned up their act, members see these type of complaints about the company all over the internet all the time.

Kay Bible believes Vector shows their recruits fabricated ads of their top competitor Henckels and gives them loaded information to make their knives seem the best. She also says she was told their product appeared in several articles like Consumer Reports magazine leading her to believe they got favorable reviews but upon researching them she found out they found issues with things like rusting and potentially uncomfortable handles. Amy Brucia says as a receptionist she was told to use misleading tactics such as rustling papers in the phone to make it sound like she was looking for an interview time to squeeze them in at, tell people she couldn’t answer questions she really could, and not tell people they’d be in a group presentation when asked. Trevor Bailey says as a former manager he was told to use psychological tricks, vague ads, loud music, flaunt rejection applications, and use reps posing as new applicants on recruits who were called “guppies” in order to sell the job to as many people in as fast amount of time as possible.

SAVE believes tens of thousands of students lose their time and many of them lose their money buying demo kits for this company and family spending hundreds of dollars on knives to help them out. An anti-Vector petition on the internet has almost 3,000 signatures. To find out more about SAVE and information on joining, you can look it up on their webpage at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/savecampaign

In the year our organization and it’s cause has been written about in more than a dozen student newspapers like Cornell’s Daily Sun: http://www.cornelldailysun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/10/23/108143310240755c0e1bbe5University of Saskatchewan’s The Sheaf:http://www.thesheaf.com/newspub/comments.cgi?view=877University of Idaho:http://www.argonaut.uidaho.edu/archives/050704/news7.htmland University of Alabama:http://www.datelinealabama.com/article/2004/03/11/5559_news_art.php3among many others getting students informed about the recruiting tactics and business practices of a company that enters the lives of many thousands of students nation-wide each year.

There’s also been a few national media chains that have picked up the story such as:Salem Statesman Journal:http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=85450Miami Herald:http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8021490.htmand Channel 10 News Albany:http://www.wten.com/Global/story.asp?S=682631