Today I called the Zaken Corporation to ask them a bunch of questions. Due to the nature of the call, I requested to speak with a manager, and was referred to Kelly. She was away from her desk or on another call at the time, so I left a message, and in less than half an hour (I didn't time it, but I think it could have been as little as 15 minutes) she returned my call. I did record the phone call, but I won't be releasing the recording at this moment. However, I am going to record the pertinent information here, with the hopes that it will clear up some confusion. A few times I have transcribed her answers verbatim; in those cases I use quotes; but not when I paraphrase her answer.

Kelly Answers Our Questions

The $148 that they are (currently) asking for will get us a training manual. I asked her if we have to order anything else (I had read on other sites that people were asked to order everything from post cards to directories of businesses). Her answer was, "You don't have to. It's optional." Then she went on to explain that while we could order stationery, a disk was included in the training manual that had all the stationery we needed available for us to print, if we wanted. Also, the manual explains how to find businesses with merchandise they want to liquidate, but we could purchase a directory from them or from "individual name brokers", if we desired. However, it isn't necessary.

One thing that I had read on some forum or somewhere was about the difficulty in negotiating a price with the seller. But the letter we received said we didn't have to do that. So I asked Kelly about it. She said that if we wanted to, we could, but it wasn't necessary, and that it wouldn't affect the commission either way. One thing we are supposed to do is get the company to send a sample of the merchandise to Zaken; once it is received, we can choose if we want to negotiate the price or not.

Why Not Hire Locals?

My husband's big question about the company was, Why do they need associates in different states? Why not just build another office and hire local people to do the work? She said, "We get that question a lot. The biggest reason is of course it would cost a lot to do that. But having people in different states, they're able to locate such unique merchandise and such different wholesalers and manufacturers in their smaller cities or areas, things that we may not have found. I can't tell you how many deals have gone through because of the interesting sellers people have brought to us." This makes sense to me. Suppose I'm driving to work one day and notice a store with this sign: "Going Out of Business--Everything Must Go!" I would contact them immediately and ask them if they would like to liquidate everything on the spot, or whatever the phone script says. If they agree, and it sells, that would be a good commission for me, but Zaken would have never found the store in South Texas from out there in California.

Refunds and Time Sensitivity

I asked her when the 30 days to get a refund starts. She said it is based on the day that we receive the package; and because they ship UPS, they can see the date it was delivered. "So if you order it on the first, and it's delivered on the fourth, you have until the fourth of the next month to return it. . . . Our systems are integrated with UPS." That's not hard to fathom, thanks to shipment tracking.

Another question I had was about the "time-sensitive nature" of the material. I mean, if they have been offering positions for years, why is it so time-sensitive now? She replied, "We reopen and close a lot. You can imagine that when we reopen, we're anxious to get it closed again. So that's why: we reopen and close it a lot."

Name Changes?

The last question that I asked was why the company had changed its name several times [note: This question was based on something I had read in a forum or somewhere; it would have been more accurate to ask about the other DBA's]; other names (about half a dozen) are listed on the BBB report about them. Here is her answer: "I work with the Better Business Bureau pretty much daily. We have changed our name two or three times, but I have never once seen on the BBB it say half a dozen. We have different companies. We have Zaken, ZLC, Magic Kid, Zaken Corp, Quick Sell, but they're all us. All those different names are us. Only a couple of them are old names that we expired, and most of those are because we moved from New York to California, and we came up with a whole new company logo and wanted a fresh name. We know that by changing your name you don't lose your rating with the BBB. We wouldn't be able to change our name and start fresh with them. We know that that would always link, so we didn't do it for that reason. We just did it to change our logo and letterhead."

Our Decision

It all makes sense. So my husband and I, after another prayer, called to order. That was a bit of work, because the order line that's open 24/7 is busy, so after accidentally hanging up (meaning that by calling back we get put back at the end of the waiting line again), we decided to call the company directly. After getting transferred a couple of times, we got with a customer service rep who looked up Rafael's address based on his name and zip code, and then took our credit card information. The lady that took our order (Ashley, I think), said it would take 3-6 days for our order to arrive--meaning that we should have it by next week sometime. That's good, because Rafael had just gone to a couple of interviews for jobs today, and unfortunately he doesn't qualify for them. So if this plan really works, we may have to rely on it for an income!

Once we have the training manual in hand and have had a chance to review it, will be adding another post here with more details.