As I saw most people were throwing out the single page yellow flier included in Monday’s Iowa State Daily, I decided to give it a look. Not that I am interested in working over break — just that I was curious as to what sort of deal this was.

Obviously, a mass advertisement soliciting work for $17.25 per hour seems too good to be true.

At least it seemed that, at that wage, they would not have a hard time keeping good employees, and word of mouth should be the best advertisement they need.

I spent about 20 minutes looking around the Web for information about this opportunity, and here is what I found: This is a sales position for Vector Marketing, who sells Cutco Cutlery.

Of course none of the Web sites (about 10 of them) that direct you to either Vector or Cutco give the price of the cutlery, nor do they mention exactly what the job entails.

This made me even more suspicious, so I kept looking.

One Web site, www.petition online.com/vector/petition.html, is actually an online petition to “stop the scamful ways of Vector Marketing and Cutco Cutlery,” which has more than 1,700 signatures.

Another interesting thing I found is that if you take the job, you actually become a customer of Vector/Cutco.

As an employee of Vector Marketing, you must first purchase the cutlery for $175 — if you decide not to purchase within a day of the original consultation, the price goes up to $350.

Once you purchase the cutlery, you then attempt to sell them by going door to door or “cold calling” for the suggested retail price of $650 (which is a pretty steep price, regardless of the knives’ quality).

About the hourly wage — some of the testimonials I found at www.thecomplaintstation.com, a Web site devoted to consumer complaints (about 4,000 complaints for Vector/Cutco), mention you may not actually receive an hourly wage,ÿor if you do, the wage is only minimal — about $6.25 per hour, not the $17.25 as advertised.

As I figured, this advertisement is too good to be true.

My suggestion to anyone interested in this type of work is to do some research before you sign up. This may be a good opportunity for some, but I recommend you be careful — you may find that after five weeks of semester break work, you’ll have nothing to show for it except a worn-out pair of tennis shoes.

Nathan VanderHorn

Graduate Student

Electrical & Computer Engineering