Must Not Have Been the Powerbars

Well, I received the call from Adriana today - that woman that I chatted with briefly at HEB the other day. We agreed on a meeting place and time - Jasons Deli. Now this was of course flag number one to me, if this was a legitimate business why were we meeting in a deli? On the contrary it was a "new business", she told me that much.

Well I saw her in line and I proceeded to order my sandwich and went to sit down with her. She was very friendly, and had a positive attitude yet this is exactly what she needed to peddle what she needed. She starts off by telling me her history of business operations; this is flag two in my head and the reason for this is if these businesses were so successful why leave them? Well it turns out that they were based in Mexico City where she had previously lived. So there could have been some good reasons for leaving them if she wanted to pursue a life in the USA.

So she continues to chat about elementary business terms - like "S-Curves" and "operating in red & black areas". She was also quite quick with working numbers and calculating simple percentages. This charade continued, but I was like "what is this, what's the point of this, what is this alleged 'position' that you may or may not have for me?" Well that's exactly the catch - Quixtar is the name.

The job would be me opening one of these store fronts where customers of mine would log into a website that I opened using Quixtar's template. This site would then lead the consumer to their site to purchase "private label" products. BELLS go off in my head...after she talked up all these affiliations that this place had she was all too quick to start talking about the "private label products, which are often better than those that you can purchase in stores." The meeting ends shortly after this - and she hands me a CD by Greg Duncan, the "Tiger Woods of private franchising".

So I pop in the CD and do a quick google search on "The truth about quixtar", after I hear several items that appeared on the CD that Adriana mentioned verbatim. It was at this point that I found out that Quixtar was the "new online amway". After reading some of the articles on the news groups about this stuff, they mention how you are encouraged to attend meetings and such. She was very adamant about me attending a meeting which I wasn't going to attend anyways since I had already made plans for tomorrow evening.

So in conclusion she didn't see the powerbars in my hand, she saw a target on my chest because she would make money off of me had I any intention of joining this little sham of a business. Why not target students and new graduates looking for a job, easy money there - especially if they are young males and the representative is an attractive woman? If she dropped the whole franchise schtick, and wasn't engaged...well never mind that.

So beware the scams out there, but in retrospect all I did was have lunch with an attractive woman, and we talked mainly about business concepts. Call it a "lunch date" that didn't develop into anything more for me (assuming there was no ring, because I do respect that), and a failed sales pitch on her side.