I've gone into detail about how much people who came to Unimart/Rent City were being ripped off. However, that seemed to be what the parent company, JM Enterprises, was based on. Their wholesale buyers club turned out to be something that wasn't completely honest with customers.
In Denver, the wholesale buyers club was known as Unimart. It went by other names in other cities across the country, like US Direct and Uniway. When I worked at Rent City, this was how the club operated: People would get postcards in the mail telling them they qualified to win one of a number of prizes, including $1,000 cash, a 19" TV, a vacation to somewhere exotic or a 35mm camera. But there was a catch. (Actually, it was several catches.) You had to be married, make above a certain income level and both you and your spouse had to attend one of their presentations.
During the presentation, they tried to get you to join their club, in which you could purchase appliances, electronics and furniture at wholesale prices. You had to pay a fee to join the club. It was several hundred dollars, but you would supposedly save more than that buying their merchandise. You paid $50 a year to remain a member. You could also pay for everything on installment plans, but I got the idea they charged the same interest rate as they did at Rent City.
People would go into the presentations, which lasted an hour and included a tour of the showroom. They would listen to the pitch and wait for it to end so they could claim their "prize." It was the camera. It was ALWAYS the camera. And it was some cheap plastic fixed-focus camera that probably cost five dollars. One of the Unimart employees told me that he once saw a couple actually get a TV set. I once had to deliver a shipment of 500 cameras to one of the Unimart locations. After we had unloaded the van, I told the staff I was going to return with 500 TVs. Their jaws dropped. I told them I was kidding.
It's bad enough that deception was used as a marketing tool to get people to come listen to the presentation. But I was surprised at how many people joined on a daily basis. I mean, at some point, they had to run out of people in the Denver area to send mailers to. And I think they did. Doing some research, I found that in the early 1990s, they had switched their campaign to leaving scratcher cards on car windshields. The cards had 10 silver panels. You were instructed to scratch off only three of the panels. If you got three cherries, then you won a chance to get one of the prizes and sit through a presentation. According to an article in "Tulsa World," all but two of the panels had cherries. And of course, if you didn't get three cherries, you could always grab the scratcher off the windshield of another car in the parking lot.
Unimart got sued several times and lost. Plaintiffs were always able to prove that they weren't really saving any money over what they could purchase at a retail establishment. I'm certain they didn't need much evidence to prove that.
All in all, it just seemed like Mr. JM set up a business that was based on seeing how much money he could coerce out of middle to lower middle class people. I think everyone who worked there got their jobs the same way I did. They just got naive people to answer their want ads and trick them into doing unethical work. You get in there and you start getting paid. It's easy to just go with the flow so you can keep your apartment and food on the table.
And Rent City? It appeared that all that business was set up for was to deliberately harrass people. They didn't care about the money they received on rentals, they just wanted excuses to make people feel misterable about their predicaments in life. I had way too much heart to work there. I'm glad I got fired. I would hate to see the person I would have turned into if I had stayed on. I definitely started feeling like I was in a downward spiral before they kicked me out.
In 2006, "Tulsa World" published a follow up on its 1992 article about the scratchers. The story said that the company no longer appeared to be in business ANYWHERE. I have no idea what happened to Mr. JM, Dind, Brud or anyone else I met while I was there. It's almost like that company was just a bad dream.
Unfortunately, it was a bad dream that a lot of other people had.
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