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| - When the Earth was first formed from fiery molten rock, more than a million years passed before the very lowest form of life emerged from the steaming cess pools of sediment & goo on the planet's crust. This, my friends, is how the amorphous, slimy single-celled creature known as the "Timeshare salesperson" came to be. (Soon after emerged the "Vegas pornslapper" along with the "Sidewalk nightclub promoter", but one thing at a time.)
[This review isn't specific to Consolidated Resorts but rather about timeshare salespeople in general].
As a salesperson myself, I've seen all sorts of variations on the sales profession - good & bad. The "relationship guy" that takes you golfing. The "gunslinger" that makes his commission then bails. The "boiler room guy" who cold-calls people, asking them questions from a flowchart. Even the "Fry's Electronics guy" who tries to sell you a "bitchin' modem" that he just happens to get a $30 spiff on, when all you wanted was directions to the little boy's room.
The "Timeshare salesperson" however takes the cake for most lecherous. Leaving a trail of slime wherever he goes, these folks don't just want to sell you something: They want to lay down bait for you to take, bleed you until you're weak, & then finally, when you can't make a payment, crack you open like a walnut & eat your SOUL.
THEY WANT TO EAT MY SOUL?
Yup. Most of these dudes are vampires & there are 3 ways they'll consume your essence:
1) The Hook
"Free 3 night stay in a Las Vegas Strip Hotel"... a lure targeting the downtrodden & sad-but-hopeful-dreamer - people that are already susceptible to buying into the idea that wasting money on a timeshare contract is a ticket to happiness. If you actually buy into their spin, you'll discover that it's nowhere near 'free': They're buying the most valuable things you can give someone: Your time, attention, & brainpower. And if you don't already have respect for how much that's worth - you soon will when you go through their gauntlet of high pressure salespeople.
They use age-old tactics like "getting you to say 'YES'" over & over again to basic questions to acclimate you to being more positive about their proposals. And you'll find that having to constantly say "NO" to their incessant pitches has a surprising similarity to interrogation techniques used in law enforcement. The big difference of course is that you voluntarily signed up for this gig, & instead of a confession, the interrogators are trying to get you to sign a contract. This is Vegas' own version of Guantanamo.
2) The Sale
Heaven forbid you actually sign a contract, because if you do, you're looking at purchasing something with commissions high enough to warrant engineering this whole sales structure. Obviously a lot of effort is taken to get you into their salesroom as a captive audience - heck, people don't go through all of this without a substantial reward - meaning the margins you're paying on the timeshare are likely to be huge.
Big margins = Lower actual value, in case you never took Business 101. And the scary thing is that the resale value on these things is highly debatable. Most people consider timeshares to be sucker bets because the timeshare market is such a crapshoot, there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to unload it.
3) The Financing
If you don't have the cash, don't worry... they'll loan you the money. Not unlike a loan shark, they'll provide you with all the financing necessary to buy their timeshares... at rates higher than those of your credit cards. And if you can't pay? POOF. Kiss it all good bye.
CONCLUSION:
If you haven't figured it out, Timeshare salespeople live off of the spiritually "weak".
- They lure people in with 'money-for-nothing' offers tapping into their inherent greed.
- They beat on people with fluffy claims of value & future investment maturity, tapping into their ignorance.
- They make people succumb to interrogation techniques like isolation, good-cop-bad-cop, & positive/negative reinforcement, tapping their lack of endurance.
These operations are like a machine, chewing people up & spitting them out, with timeshare salespeople being the caretakers of the machine.
Normally, I don't have a problem with anything involving legal commerce or capitalism - it's the American way. I even don't have much of a problem with the Walmart's & Costco's of the world, controlling the sales of product from 3rd world countries - after all, there's tremendous benefit to be obtained by these countries from doing business in this fashion.
But on an individual basis: Targeting the downtrodden, preying off the ignorant, using boiler-room-sales-tactics... all of this has remarkable parallels to the Sub-Prime mortgage crisis that we've just been going through as a nation. To be clear - there's nothing ILLEGAL about what they're doing. To me however, it just seems ethically challenged.
ONE STAR!
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