Managing Door-to-Door Sales of Vacuum Cleaners in Interwar Britain

Abstract

Door-to-door selling was a key factor behind the particularly rapid interwar diffusion of vacuum cleaners among British households, relative to other “high-ticket” labor-saving appliances. Yet the door-to-door system incurred both high distribution costs and considerable controversy—owing to widespread sharp practice. Employers enticed salesmen through grossly inflated claims regarding earnings, which were in fact insufficient for most salesmen to make an acceptable living. This led many salesmen to engage in their own sharp practices—which eventually brought this form of marketing into disrepute.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.