War, war never changes. This is the one phrase that continues to echo through the Fallout franchise. Fallout is a series of role playing video games that take place in a post apocalyptic America where instead of the Cold War ending, it continued to escalate, resulting in a time freeze of 50’s America where corrupt monopolies, propaganda, and retrofuturistic tech littered the world. As a result of this time freeze, nuclear technology escalated and resulted in The Great War, a nuclear exchange that lasted 10 minutes and caused the end of the world. One of the main focuses of this game series is a company called Vault-Tec, a company that specialized in fallout shelters that acquired a government contract to build bunkers to protect the population. It’s clear in the franchise that Vault-Tec’s staff are not the good guys, since in reality these vaults were secretly contracted by the government in order to perform experiments on it’s dwellers. This post is focusing on the way Vault-Tec sales representatives would go door to door selling homes in the vault.
In the new Fallout show Prime Video released, there are extras that add to the history of this world in the form of animated orientation videos for Vault-Tec salesmen, and the video I want to focus on today is “Follow Your No’s!”
The general gist of this promotional video is that instead of trying to actually address the pain when presented with it, Vault-Tec is expecting salesmen to repeat lines and try to use hopelessness and desperation to sell space in their fallout shelters. The title is a play on words of following your nose, and I think it’s interesting to see how an unethical version of pursuing the no can play out. Because this Vault-Tec promo encourages the no’s to find the pain and then exploit it in order to sell space in the vaults. It’s an interesting (and over the top) look at h0w good sales practice can be flipped on it’s head. There are certain scenarios explored in the video, like one that goes along the lines of “I don’t think I want to spend so much on this” to which the instructional video recommends the response “Would you put a price on your families safety???” and takes it to extremes to pressure sales. There’s other instances such as exploiting the Bible and comparing Vault-Tec to salvation and not purchasing space in a Vault to being turned to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife and saying “you don’t wanna end up like Lot’s wife do you?”. It puts genuinely problematic selling strategies into a totally ridiculous light and it’s a good caricature of what people can see terrible salesmen as.
BoweryJE22