A lot depends on the paid spokesperson. We know alpha forum personalities who can dominate a board and love to squash hecklers and take on all comers. (That does sound like TB, doesn’t it? I’ll bet he’d make a great forum salesman for certain kinds of things. Like the books of Ayn Rand.) The ultimate forum-salesperson type is somebody who can use the hecklers and trolls as foils to come out of it looking even better to the audience. Which is what I mean when I go on about the personal nature of this kind of selling. Mano-a-mano living on your wits. That seems inherently more honest than selling by advertising, don’t ya think?

It’s that bazaar thing. Americans have gotten out of practice playing the game with shopkeepers and merchants, because for decades most selling’s been done at arm’s length through advertising. But we still enjoy it when we go overseas and haggle with souvenir sellers and other real merchants. I think that a lot of people who’ve become couch potato consumers, passively absorbing electronic sales pitches, might wake up and start to groove on playing the game with other living breathing people.

And they’ll give the salespukes something to do and keep ‘em out of the hair of the rest of us. That’s my idea of utopia. But your mileage my differ.

Another issue is that people tend to be rude on those things. I can see a Chevrolet partisan calling a Ford salesman something pretty bad.

I don’t think it would work, and I think it’s a good idea. No one would have to go there.