Sales Pitch is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in Future Science Fiction magazine, June 1954. The premise of omni-present, intrusive and even aggressive advertising and marketing is as relevant as ever. In the end of the story, the character is driven mad by a robot who can forcefully market himself, and refuses to take no for an answer. The subject was of concern to Dick, and features in his early works such as The Man Who Japed. Dick was ahead of his time: advertising was still considered relatively innocuous in the 1950s. A more subtle extrapolation of the idea is seen in J. G. Ballard's The Subliminal Man, written nearly 10 years later.
In 1978, Dick said of the story:
"When this story first appeared, the fans detested it. I read it over, perplexed by their hostility, and could see why: it is a superdowner story, and relentlessly so. Could I rewrite it, I would have it end differently. I would have the man and the robot, i.e. the fasrad, form a partnership at the end and become friends. The logic of paranoia of this story should be deconstructed into its opposite; Y, the human-against-robot theme, should have been resolved into null-Y, human-and-robot-against-the-universe. I really deplore the ending. So when you read the story, try to imagine it as it ought to have been written. The fasrad says, 'Sir, I am here to help you. The hell with my sales pitch. Let's be together forever.' Yes, but then I would have been criticized for a false upbeat ending, I guess. Still, the ending is not good. The fans were right."
Famous quotes containing the words sales and/or pitch:
“The damned are in the abyss of Hell, as within a woeful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments, in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin.”
—St. Francis De Sales (1567–1622)
“He maintained that the case was lost or won by the time the final juror had been sworn in; his summation was set in his mind before the first witness was called. It was all in the orchestration, he claimed: in knowing how and where to pitch each and every particular argument; who to intimidate; who to trust, who to flatter and court; who to challenge; when to underplay and exactly when to let out all the stops.”
—Dorothy Uhnak (b. 1933)