kicking puppies is bad

A friend of mine was trying to describe this guy she had just met.  And her description was something like, “He was oily.  And not in the smooth olive oil sort of way.  In the nasty, cloying, crisco sort of way.  He had that used-car-salesman vibe.”   Used car salesmen have a bad reputation, but that reputation can often be applied pretty accurately to many different groups of sales people. 

I try not to interact with *any* people (it is why I picked a career path that involves sitting in a windowless office programming all day), but I have a specific dislike for people who are trying to sell me something.   Yesterday after work I went looking at homes with a realtor.  I’ve been interacting with a lot of realtors lately.  And I can’t think of a profession that has a stronger “used-car-salesman” vibe (except perhaps used-car-salesman or maybe electronics salesmen (but I’m probably biased because I used to date one of those)).  Anyways, if you do a google image search for “realtor”, the fifth image is “Lou”:

who looks like a smarmy used-car-salesman?

And while most of the “realtors” on google image search aren’t so obviously creepy-used-car-sales-people, there are a significant number of them with fake tans.

like this charming lady...

And I don’t get it.  Why do sales people think that we like fake tans?  Do they really help with sales?  Just so you don’t think I’m unfairly discriminating against realtors, I wanted to make it clear that I realize that the image associated with my profession isn’t much better.  I image searched “SAS programmer” and got this shining example of nerdhood:

Isn't he sexy?

But my point wasn’t actually to just make fun of realtors.   I’m actually curious why sales people become so smarmy.  I dated this guy who sold electronics once.   The more time he spent selling stuff, the more smarmy he became.   And apparently it worked for him.  He because one of the top salesmen in his region (and then he got a graduate degree in theoretical physics and became an academic or something – but from what I understand he retained all of his salesperson smarminess).  He also convinced me that smarminess sells stuff.

Why do consumers respond to fake tans and bleached hair?  It always creeps me out and makes me want to run away (without buying anything).  And I always sort of assume that most people have the same reaction that I do.  But if it didn’t work, salespeople (and realtors) wouldn’t do it.  So who are these consumers who flock to fake tans?    And why do they do it? 

Anyways, it turns out that the realtor I was dealing with yesterday was actually fairly competant.  But it took me a long time to realize that because I was distracted by his glowing orange tan.   And I think I would have taken him a lot more seriously (from the start), if both his skin and his hair were a more natural color.