Yeah, that’ll get you canned pretty quickly.
Of course these days Eric Church has a pretty cool gig, making music he loves, playing for crowds of adoring fans and selling out arenas across the country on his recently wrapped film Gather again.
Long before he was the country star he is now, Church found himself selling knives for a home shopping network.
But it looks like he wasn’t as good at it as he rocks a crowd…
After graduating from Appalachia State, Church moved to Nashville to try and make her big break in the music business. Of course, you don’t just immediately move to Nashville and become a country star overnight, which means he’s had to work some pretty shitty side jobs to support himself while he gets by. was doing well in his musical career.
And according to Church, the worst part was working the night shift on the home shop network.
“I’ve had a lot of awful jobs…the worst was when I came to Nashville. I found a job at the Shop at Home network. I worked midnight, cemetery, eight minutes to midnight.
It was bad enough, but I was working all night, coming home, showering, and having dates all day because I was trying to start a career.
I was going to write songs and hold meetings just to try to get signed. And I would end up getting 3 out of 4 with all of that, I would go home, shower or get some sleep and then I had to be back to work at midnight.
Yeah, it looks miserable enough as it is. But Eric said that wasn’t the reason he didn’t stay at work very long. Turns out it had something to do with the product he was selling:
“I was selling knives from midnight to 7 or 8 a.m. And any time someone calls you at 3 or 4 a.m. and needs 200 knives for $19.95, that’s automatically an alarming situation.
And I was just, I was young and I had been in a lot of these people’s shoes, I had done that… I knew they were drunk. I knew what they had done. They had just come in from the bar, turned on Shop at Home and said, “You know what? I need this.'”
200 knives for $19.95? I don’t care what time it is, that sounds like a hell of a deal. Sign me up.
For real, I know exactly what he’s talking about. You get drunk, turn on the TV, and get sucked into those infomercials, and the next thing you know you’re the proud owner of a 10-in-1 air fryer and rotisserie you never would have bought if you were sober .
But apparently Church wasn’t so keen on selling people knives in the middle of the night:
“So the reason the job didn’t last long for me was that I was maybe the worst salesman in history because I ended up talking a lot of these people out of it, I say, “I’ll tell you what man, go to bed, call me, I’ll be there tomorrow morning. If you get up in the morning and want those knives, you call me.
Because I knew what was coming, you know. They bought 200 knives for $19.95… first of all some of these people you didn’t know if you should call the cops. Why do you need 200 knives? Even if I sell them… why do you need them? »
Honestly, it’s probably a good choice. And I kinda wish Amazon had that feature too, as many packages as we get back home after my fiancee knocked the wine a little too much. Maybe a little pop-up asking if you’ve been drinking and telling you to come back tomorrow morning. Or maybe someone like Eric can call you just to make sure you really wanted to order an ice machine at 3 a.m.
But of course, his bosses didn’t really appreciate the fact that he was dissuading people from buying the product he was supposed to sell:
“So it was awful doing this job. And then they got rid of me because they were like, ‘You’re the worst. I can’t believe you’re talking people out of it.
I was like, ‘Man I know…I’ve been there.’ I wish someone would talk me out of buying some of the things I bought at 2am.
Classic Eric Church: Never be afraid to break the rules to be kind to others.
And for obvious reasons, here it is:
