On Bridge-Selling

One Wednesday afternoon Fernando found himself speaking on the phone with a representative from a movie distribution company, something of a coincidence seeing as Fernando's current distributor had just recently fucked up royally and managed to get him zero of the copies of Little Fockers he'd ordered, forcing him to pick them up at the local Wal-Mart.

This man took Fernando's meager abilities at salesmanship and pooped all over them. He knew his stuff. He mentioned things in the industry that only someone who had actually worked in the industry would know (as opposed to people who sit in a distribution office). Fernando wishes he had the sales chops this guy did. All in all, he did his job very admirably and sold Fernando on his company's business model, which he made sound as if it had been carved by Christopher Lee himself using a mithril chainsaw on a metric ton of unicorn butter.

But despite the man's overbearing charisma, Fernando is not an idiot. Anything that sounds too good to be true most often is.

So Fernando did some snooping on the internets and turned up some kernels of information that the nice salesman had neglected to mention during his piece. Like the fact that Fernando would have to pay a $40 per month subscription fee to use the company's services. Or that for Fernando to get the super-low prices he had been quoted he would need to order a great many movies...not aggregate, no, but from each distribution company. So he'd need a glut of Universal followed by a glut of Paramount followed by a glut of Lions Gate followed by a glut of Weinstein Brothers and so forth. The size and composition of Fernando's customer base is such that he has minimal use for a large variety of indie and foreign films or, conversely, twenty different copies of Black Swan or The Next Three Days. And this does not, of course, even touch on the logistics of inventory management in finding space for all these additional, mandatory films.

What peeved most Fernando is not the fact that these constraints existed so much as that they had been kept veiled and would likely have sprung up as an unpleasant surprise after a hypothetical contract signing had gone through. Of course, Fernando could always void the contract, but that would require him to pay, according to discussions of this company's business model that Fernando had espied online, $250 to the PoS (that's point-of-sale, you pottyminds...though the alternative expression is also rather apropos in this circumstance) software distributor to give him an alphanumeric code that would allow him to cancel his $40/month account. Rather shady, all told. But Fernando supposes that is what stellar salesmanship and burgeoning success in business is all about.

So when the gentleman called back the next week to attempt scheduling an in-person sit-down with one of his company's representatives, Fernando informed him that these services were not something in which he was interested at this time. The sales representative of course apologized and attempted to regain Fernando's trust by offering him “incentives” for keeping the company in mind, but Fernando did not allow his opinion to be swayed.

Fernando would rather deal with the occasional no-show movie, for which he is not charged, from his current distributor than sign on to a company set upon screwing its customers out of money through subscription and cancellation fees.