Complaint Review: Dooley Productions(Kirby Corp.) - Grand Prairie Texas

Carl... don't try to pretend like you aren't deceiving people. Stretching the truth, or conveniently omitting details, may not be "lying" in a technical sense, but it sure is deception. I unfortunately wasted time on a very similar racket several years ago. While I will admit that the Kirby machines are far superior to standard vacuum cleaners they are GROSSLY overpriced. For the amount of money you spend on a Kirby you could have a professional cleaning crew come to your house and do your carpets every two months for four years. However, the quality of the machine and its extremely high price is not the issue here. The issue is deceptive recruiting practices. You put an ad in the paper hoping to catch people who never heard the phrase "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Can you possibly deny that your classified ads are worded and designed to appear as though you are offering legitimate, and profitable, wage or salary employment? Let's say you bring in sixty recruits per month. How many do you think you would bring in if your classified ads were worded to reflect the reality of the pay structure? How many of those sixty people stick around after they hear what the pay structure is? How many of those people stick around through the entire training period? And most importantly, how many of those people would you expect to ever make a dime off of your enterprise? I think the original poster's husband should consider himself lucky that he actually made $75.00! Here's a description of my personal experience: I was in a job where I was making not-so-great money, but enough to survive. I read an ad in the paper that stated "$385 per week - 15 people needed to fill production positions in a rapidly growing company." I would imagine that your ad is similar. Upon being "hired," I left my employment with high hopes that my life was taking a turn for the better. Here's the reality: these "production positions" were commissioned sales jobs selling grossly overpriced vaccum cleaners marketed as "home cleaning systems." (Sound familiar?). The first week of "employment" wasn't even paid. They justified this by telling us that they were "educating" us, and colleges don't pay you to get an education (I would love it if you tried to argue the validity of this statement with me - oh please, please do!). The "$385 per week" was what you would get paid if you made 15 2 hour presentations and didn't make any sales. Sounds easy enough, but in reality it would have involved a huge dedication of time, probably about 60 hours a week, making B.S. presentations to people in their homes trying to sell them a product you felt was not nearly worth its price. And that was if you could actually come up with 15 people to give presentations to! If you fell short of this mark, you got nothing. The commissions for senior salesmen were generous, but the likelihood of making it to that point was infinitessimal, as evidenced by the fact that out of fifteen offices in our "district" representing an average of ten salespeople per week/per office there were only two (yes 2!) people in this bracket. The specifics of these vacuum-sales-ripoffs are too numerous to mention. If you don't realize that you are exlpoiting people, carl, then you either have no conscience or you need to wake up and smell the dustmites. You entice people to leave gainful employment to come work for you and make nothing. If that's not a ripoff (and if a $1500 vacuum cleaner isn't a ripoff) then you tell me what is. On a final note to this longwinded rebuttal, let me preempt your inevitable argument that the people who fail out of your industry are just too lazy to succeed. This is an absolute falsity designed to make people like you feel better about the lives that you ruin. People are very willing to work very hard at an enterprise if they feel it will bring them success. Fortunately, most people, even though they are naive enough to fall for bogus classified ads, are smart enough to realize when they're wasting their time.

Dooley Productions Inc. is an authorized Kirby Factory Distributorship. We are indeed in business of selling the finest home care systems in the world. We recruit Independent Kirby Dealers to market our products, solely for In-Home Demonstrations and sale to the users. Any other sale is strictly prohibited. Our dealers are offered an Incentive Earning Program. They MUST DO 54 DEMONSTRATIONS in a 31day period to qualify, since the dealers are independent, they can do demonstrations to any qualified buyer that they choose. We have appointments available seven (7) days a week. We do participate in the Southwest Division $1000.00 drawing. This drawing is held approximately every 90 days. The $1000.00 winners names are available at all participating distributorship. We do offer to shampoo one (1) room of carpet with a preview of the new ULTIMATE G HOME CARE SYSTEM. Our dealers are also offered bonuses for presentations, sales and leads, like most direct sales companies. If our independent dealers do not qualify for their incentive earnings, they would then strictly be paid their commissions on their sales. All of our Independent dealers are given a 6 hour orientation their first day, explaining how the program works. No one is lied to about anything. Lying is not tolerated. Whether it involves a dealer, a customer or any employee of this corporation. We are very proud of our company, our product and all of the many people we have helped to establish a career in our business. President-CEO Dooley Productions P.S. In regards to the temperature being 95 degrees, I do take full responsibility for all weather conditions in north central Texas.