The actress Barbara Stanwyck, playing a society woman named Jess Drummond, was anxious. She was waiting, hoping for a phone call from a man she had recently met and, despite her reticence, was attracted to. She had lived a stifled life as a daughter, wife and mother, and now that she was a widow, she had finally decided to be herself.
This man could be her lifeline – someone outside her catty social circle – a military man who was both rough and teasing. The phone rang, she literally ran to it and picked up the receiver.
No, I have enough magazine subscriptions, she said softly but with disappointment. No, I don’t want any cookbooks.
When I heard her say those lines in the 1946 movie “My Reputation,” I sat up attentively. A telemarketer in the 1940s? They’ve been harassing people for that long?
I was both amazed and curious as I sat there watching the movie on TV. I thought telemarketers were a modern-day phenomena, calling us all day and into the evening as if we have nothing better to do than spend an hour talking to them. That short scene told volumes about how they were perceived 70 years ago (the movie was actually made in 1944): that even then telemarketers were a pain in the butt. And that they knew when to call at the wrong time.
Public solicitations didn’t start with the telephone, but its invention catapulted the practice. First there were paper mailings. As early as 1903, the Multi-Mailing Co. of New York, a company “that makes a business of addressing mail advertising and furnishing names,” compiled lists of telephone owners in seven states plus New England. The lists contained the names and addresses of 600,000 people “and there is little reason to doubt that they are the best classes in their communities, for the possession of a telephone bespeaks a certain standing socially and financially,” according to a 1903 page from the advertising journal Printers’ Ink.
The lists were not used to call these people, but to mail them letters and circulars advertising services and products.
One site noted that stock brokers had been using phones to find customers for years. During the 1930s and 1940s, calls were made by sales representatives inside wholesale distribution companies, according to Reference for Business. By the 1940s and 1950s, magazines used these calls to sell to new customers such as Mrs. Drummond and renew current subscribers.
The telemarketing firm DialAmerica was formed in 1957, and was said to have been the first and now has grown to be the largest. I could find very little about the firm’s beginnings. The Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) introduced by the Bell System in the early 1960s was a boon for telephone sales. It offered businesses long-distance plans at a flat rate that was less costly and was instrumental in making calls centers affordable. A few years later, it was followed by toll-free 800 numbers that allowed consumers to directly reach advertisers at no cost.
As worrisome as it is, telemarketing is a billion-dollar industry, but revenue appears to be dropping. In 2008, it was at $21 billion, according to statisca.com, and by 2013, at $18 billion. Some of the country’s major companies have call centers employing thousands of people, including American Express with 5,200 as of May 2014, along with banks, investment companies and health-care organizations whose employment numbers are not far behind.
The industry had 234,000 workers nationwide with an average salary of $25,000 in May 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Florida had the largest number of telemarketing workers – more than 26,000, followed by Texas and Ohio.
While I was writing this blog post, I got three telemarketing calls. One was an automated call from Comcast about upgrading my modem for free, which I had already done after the first call about two weeks ago. When I picked up my phone for the other two, I heard only silence before a voice answered “Hello” and I hung up. That’s what I do these days, listen for silence and then click “Off” on my portable receiver.
In my research, I learned that’s not the way to do it, that I should nicely ask that my name be removed from the company’s internal Do Not Call list. I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry but I still get phone calls because some organizations are not forbidden to call you.
Mrs. Drummond’s call was short and sweet. I’m sure that wasn’t the last of it. Telemarketers don’t give up once they connect with you or a live number.
