I worked as a door to door salesperson for about 3 months while I was studying. It was fun, but only because we were selling a pretty good phone+broadband deal. It also came at about a time when the main competitor was copping a lot of flak for bad customer service in the media, so a lot of people were quite happy to jump ship.

By a lot of people, I mean like 5 out of the 80-100 houses I'd knock on every day, so I still had to get used to a fair bit of doorslamming and cursing. It was worth it though. I got $100 commission for every sale so I was usually pretty happy to work hard for 1 or 2 days and then spend the rest of the week doing nothing. If the location we were going out to was close to home, I'd just go home for a few hours and go back to the office later to process the sales. If it wasn't, I'd find the local library, sign up for a card, borrow something and just read in a park all afternoon.

Anyway, I'm pretty nice to any doorknockers or street sales people as a result. It can be pretty depressing work. I just tell them that I'm sorry and that I'm not interested. Sometimes the pushier ones do get annoying though. I never used to try and push people into a sale. I thought of it more as a numbers game - approach enough people and eventually someone will say yes because they'll genuinely want it. You're just making your job harder if you try and convince every other person who doesn't want it in the first place.