The Comic Book Sales Team

Today’s GIF comes from a channel that reads through old Archie comics. Speaking of constant nudges, I discovered today’s piece via my commissioned search offering. Want to get a search of your own commissioned? Check the ad below:

The comic book sales clubs: A topic too obscure for the modern internet? Mayhaps

I’ve searched for countless things on the internet, and this may be one of the most obscure topics I’ve ever encountered, judging by its minimal modern digital footprint.

I’ve found precisely one mainstream article from the digital era that discusses this general idea (a Mental Floss piece), and it’s 11 years old. No Wikipedia articles. Very little in the way of corporate histories.

What we do have, however, is an abundance of ads in comic books. The Internet Archive is full of them—literally hundreds of ads in every comic book imaginable, along with publications popular with kids, like Boys’ Life.

Fittingly for ads common in comic books, the pitch leaned on unobtainium. The full-page ads displayed various items that might entice young children—toys, video game consoles, cassette players, musical instruments—and offer a way to acquire them.

These companies each had names suggesting that you were joining a larger organization:

• Youth Opportunity Sales Club
• Junior Sales Club of America
• The Sales Leadership Club
• Olympic Sales Club
• Cheerful House

Most of these “clubs,” based on the addresses listed in magazines and comic books, emerged from New England, primarily Connecticut or Massachusetts. Once you signed on for one of these programs, you were expected to go door-to-door, selling your wares.

When these services started appearing in the 1950s and 1960s, this kind of person-to-person selling was growing quite popular. The sales club model started gaining traction during the same period that multi-level marketing firms like Amway, Avon, and Tupperware took off. One positive aspect: These sales clubs didn’t borrow too heavily from the Amway model—the multi-level-marketing aspect, to whatever degree it existed, was downplayed.

But the problematic nature of this model is obvious. One article from 1994 highlights a mom’s anger when Olympia Sales Club of Canada sent catalogs to her young children, unsolicited. She was so upset that she went to the media.

“I phoned them and told them ‘your sales tactics are disgusting,’” the mom, Marion Morgan, told the Vancouver Province.

The company attempted to defend its practices—which included mailing lists of families with children and sending out catalogs—but the piece noted that (at least in Canada) it operated in a legal gray area. Technically, it wasn’t employment, which meant it lacked employment protections. (Also: The company was American, placing it beyond the jurisdiction of Canadian regulators.)

And that’s before considering door-to-door stranger danger, which the model essentially required for making sales. After all, you couldn’t exactly use the internet to sell these greeting cards.

In many ways, many of the same complaints one could make about the creator economy also apply to these kinds of gigs. It was essentially offline affiliate marketing—you sold these goods by any means necessary to earn a commission. The cuts were too small for this to be viable for adults, especially in the pre-internet era. But for kids? It was a perfect way to learn something about the value of a dollar, or so the thinking went.

So, what about the companies that used this model?

One line of discussion I heard when I was researching this topic was that all the clubs were owned by the same company. That’s not totally true, but it definitely played into how these sales clubs marketed themselves.

Perhaps the largest one I found was called Bevis Industries. It was a conglomerate that touched a lot of mail order businesses during this period. It was not uncommon to pick up an issue of House & Garden in the early 1970s and see multiple ads from Bevis Industries, promoting unrelated products to the same customer. That was the company’s strategy—and it meant spending significant money on advertising. One of the things it advertised was the Youth Opportunity Sales Club.

Through my research, I found Bevis Industries ads dating to the early 1970s in numerous magazines, among them Sports Illustrated, Time, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They weren’t alone, of course, but this was the game—you advertised goods heavily, and eventually someone would buy that knife set or porcelain coffee service. Or a sales club targeted at kids.

This meant that Bevis Industries—which, around this period, leased a historic Connecticut cotton mill and converted it into a giant mail-order warehouse—was effectively marketing to the public in six different ways under a variety of brand names.

Bevis eventually disappeared, but the Youth Opportunity Sales Club appears to have outlived it, at least for a time. (More on Bevis in a bit.)

Another major advertiser with a very similar strategy to Bevis was Sunshine Art Studios, based in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sunshine manufactured gift cards, wrapping paper, and other paper-based goods, which it sold via a network of kids, often in a fundraiser format.

It ran the Junior Sales Club of America, Sales Leadership Club, and several similar services. But as the Federal Trade Commission noted in a 1972 complaint against the company, it also ran a collection agency that was literally shaking down kids for $10 in unsold goods. A sample of one such letter, per the FTC complaint:

You have failed to settle your long-overdue account with our client, Junior Sales Club of America, Springfield, Massachusetts, although we previously wrote to you a detailed letter concerning this important obligation.

To avoid action by our attorney, we urge you to immediately send a $9.50 money order or check made payable to the Junior Sales Club of America. DO IT TODAY.

Imagine being a 10-year-old kid getting sued over some gift wrap you failed to sell—that was sent to you when you didn’t even ask for it. Some sales club.

The FTC ultimately decided that Sunshine Art Studios couldn’t require kids to pay them back for goods they didn’t request, or send them to collections for not sending money. (The model, in this light, was similar to Columbia House’s negative option billing model.)

Despite the harsh decision and the “deceptive” nature of its business, Sunshine Art actually managed to survive for few more decades, only disappearing with a bankruptcy auction around 2009. The sales clubs didn’t last quite so long—but that’s fine, it had the internet.

Finally, we get to the one people of my generation likely remember, Olympia Sales, which often sold its goods under the Olympic Sales Club brand. Founded in 1966 by Arthur O’Hara, it is the only one of these businesses that appears to still have a website, however bare bones.

This is the firm that upset Marion Morgan so much that she called a reporter. But looking online, you’ll see nostalgia for this firm and its memorable ads. Then, as now, the firm is based in Enfield, Connecticut—about 15 minutes from Springfield, Massachusetts, and an hour from Baltic, Connecticut. (These were separate companies, but they were a shout away from one another.)

Like Sunshine Art, Olympic Sales Club specialized in greeting cards, which kids then sold to their neighbors. Unlike its competitors, it had enough success with this model that it continued well into the 1990s, reflected by the improved print quality of its ads and circulars. As the internet age picked up, along with concerns about stranger danger, Olympia Sales moved into the wholesale market. Which is why they still exist today.

The company (along with Sunshine) had a relatively decent business track record, per assessments by the Better Business Bureau, but that did not stem complaints—I found several published in newspapers over the years, including from a kid who didn’t get their promised Donkey Kong game.

But by the late ’90s, their reputation had been set in stone. A 1997 article published by Consumers Union’s Zillions Magazine warned kids not to invest their money into firms like Olympic, because of the shaky track record of success:

Sarah reported that “not as many people buy as you think.” She sold just 15 items over the course of six months. Her experience was typical of about half our sales-clubbers. They put in between 5 and 10 hours drumming up business, filling out order forms, and distributing merchandise when it arrived (about a month after sending in the order). For all their effort, they earned about $3 an hour. A respectable wage—but plenty of kids made a lot less.

Klair, for example, put in more than 20 hours one month and sold a grand total of two items. She ended up returning her customers’ money. Why? She didn’t want to pay the $2 shipping-and-handling fee the Olympia Sales Club charges for sending out fewer than seven items per order. That fee would have eaten up half her profits! (Sales Leadership, the other club our testers tried, charges $2 for orders of fewer than five items.)

“Besides,” added Klair, “the paperwork is a hassle and hard to fill out. I didn’t want to waste a first-class stamp—or any more of my time.”

Put simply, kids had gotten too smart for this model, as attractive as the idea of getting a Game Boy from a catalog actually was. It only makes sense that the sales clubs petered out around this time. The shifting cultural ties, and stories not unlike Paul Buchheit’s encounter with a pit bull, certainly made the model a lot less attractive.

The cards were expensive, and the sales pitch was just like everything else—you didn’t buy the gift cards because you wanted them, you bought them because a kid gave you a good sales pitch. We had better sales models for such low-hanging fruit.