If you know a student who’s looking for work, you may have heard about Vector Marketing. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cutco Cutlery. According to one Vector Marketing website, workforstudents.com, the company offers a number of benefits for student employment.
According to the website, Vector Marketing offers “Full and part time openings.” The website also states that these student jobs “provide practical work experience with excellent pay and a flexible schedule. A great way to build your resume.”
Among the other benefits, the website states, “Over $50,000 in scholarships awarded to students annually earned through work performance. Over $120,000 donated to universities annually.”
In an effort to show their stability, the website also states that Vector Marketing started in 1981, “…has over 250 locations in the US and Canada with annual sales of over $200 million.”
Giving away $170,000 in scholarships and donations to students and universities is, on the surface, very generous. However, when you do the math, this comes out to about one percent of revenues. Walmart, on the other hand, states that their corporate giving “exceeds $1 billion for the first time.” With sales of $443 billion according to Walmart’s last annual report, that equates to .25% compared to Vector Marketing’s .1%.
I admit that many years ago I was taken in by the lure of Amway. I sold soap to my parents and friends and learned that I was a dismal failure at sales. During the past three years, there have been 168 complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau (bbb.org), most of which have been resolved. I reviewed the most recent five complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau. Of those, one had no details, one was apparently from a customer who had been billed incorrectly, and three were from students who felt they had been deceived by the company. Of those three complaints, one was successfully resolved and two were closed with the statement, “BBB’s Final Determination: Business offered a resolution. Consumer did not pursue further with BBB and the matter was assumed to be resolved.”
Vector Marketing has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. Whether that rating is deserved or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a lot of controversy surrounding the company right now. Do you think it’s deserved or is the company simply suffering from its own good intentions, i.e., trying to employ young people who lack work experience?
When my daughter graduated from High School she had great difficulty finding a job because she lacked the experience companies wanted. The old catch 22 how do you get experience if companies will not train. She enrolled in College part time and continued her job search hoping to land a job that did not include wearing an apron. She interviewed with Vector Marketing in Fort Worth, TX and got a sales job and started training. She did go through training without being paid and then started setting appointments with friends and relatives. The products are excellent and priced reasonably for high quality items. The demo set she received did not cost her a dime but salespeople are required to return the kit if they decide they do not want to sell their products or they do have to pay for the kit. This is considered a contract position and truly gives young people the benefit of training and learning skills without cost to them. They are paid a set amount for each appointment or if they sell an item a percentage of the sale (whichever is higher). Trade schools charged students thousands of dollars to educate students, Vector does it for free The work environment is positive and the employees are enthusiastic. Vector also maintains a A+ Rating with the Better Business Bureau. Sales are not for everyone but if you would like try and get experience to build your resume, Vector is a good place to start.
Thanks for your comment, Anne. I’m glad your daughter had a positive experience with them and hope the experience has benefited her career. I think that much of what this comes down to is the individual manager doing the hiring. Hence, we see a wide variety of experiences with this company.
While it’s true that the company has an A+ rating at this time, there have been (as of today) 147 complaints filed in the past 3 years. In contrast, Amway also maintains an A+ rating and has had 10 complaints during the same time period.
Unfortunately, Amway has a history of allegations of Pyramid Schemes and don’t forget the class action lawsuit filed by independent distributors who claimed Amway misled them and engaged in unfair practices. The class action lawsuit settled in 2010. If you research the news articles most of the distributors never made a profit. It looks like changes were made after the class action lawsuit was settled.
Vector on the other hand pays a straight commission or a hourly fee for appointments, provides training for inexperienced workers at no cost. Pretty straight forward to me with no hidden agendas. It is inspiring to see such a nice group of young people learning skills that will help them for life. Every company can experience a bad Manager and it looks like Vector does a good job in weeding these out. So many blogs are popping up with nothing but negative feedback and I did notice the only comment made by administration was on my positive feedback. So is Vector real? I say it is….
They are not shady. It is a position where you get paid to sell and you get paid when you make sales. Seems like unsuccessful people just complain about the company. The knives are top notch and the training is very good. I made extra cash when I was just out of high school one summer. It’s called sales, not harassment when you talk to your friends and neighbors about a good product that is well priced. I still have the knives today and love them.
The company is shady, at best. They are the same variety of “multi-level marketing” that Amway and like fall into. You spend $175+ for a demo kit and are then supposed to harass everyone you know and go door to door. This company not only spams college campuses by leaving cards and flyers everywhere, but they are reported to have acquired people’s personal info from high schools (I would probably sue the school system if this had happened to me).
I would be curious to see what their income comes from. The other companies that I’m familiar with make a large portion of their money by convincing people to buy “starer kits” or “starting admin fees”. Another chunk comes from having people pay money to attend “conventions” in hotel ballrooms that are pitched as giving you the “secrets” you need to reach “diamond level” (or what ever stupid name they have for what is usually almost impossible to obtain).
It is pretty easy to see that if you have over 200 locations nationwide achieving 200+ million in “sales” is pretty easy by just conning naive college students. Doing a bit of simple math (and using conservative numbers) each location only needs about 6900 students to fall for the scam. Or just 8% of the 17 million students nation wide. Of course these numbers also include recent high school graduates that don’t actually go to college and other people besides students filling in the gaps. Of course, I know they actually succeed in selling knives legitimately at some point. However, I would wager that the bulk of their income is from “demo kits”.
The internet is rife with complaints about all of these things. No one is complaining about Walmart or legitimate knife companies scamming people into becoming “independent business owners”. The fact that they have an “A+ Rating” with the BBB, only tells me that the BBB probably isn’t as credible as we would like it to be either.
Thanks for the comments, Justin. It does seem very shady. I think you’ve pretty much nailed many of the facts.
The business practices of Vector Marketing are a hot topic on the internet right now. Have you heard of them? Have experience with them?