see Ron pitch the Chop-O-Matic at the State Street Woolworth’s. “He was mesmerizing,” Korey says. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.” Several years ago, Ron’s friend Steve Wynn, the founder of the Mirage resorts, went to visit Michael Milken in prison. They were near a television, and happened to catch one of Ron’s infomercials just as he was doing the countdown, a routine taken straight from the boardwalk, where he says, “You’re not going to spend two hundred dollars, not a hundred and eighty dollars, not one-seventy, not one-sixty . . .” It’s a standard pitchman’s gimmick: it sounds dramatic only because the starting price is set way up high. But something about the way Ron did it was irresistible. As he got lower and lower, Wynn and Milken — who probably know as much about profit margins as anyone in America — cried out in unison, “Stop, Ron! Stop!”
Was Ron the best? The only attempt to settle the question definitively was made some forty years ago when Ron and Arnold were working a knife set at the Eastern States Exposition, in West Springfield, Massachusetts. A third man, Frosty Wishon, who was a legend in his own right, was there, too. “Frosty was a well-dressed, articulate individual and a good salesman,” Ron says. “But he thought he was the best. So I said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a ten-day show, eleven, maybe twelve hours a day. We’ll each do a rotation, and we’ll compare how much we sell.” In Morris-Popeil lore, this is known as “the shoot-out,” and no one has ever forgotten the outcome. Ron beat Arnold, but only by a whisker — no more than a few hundred dollars. Frosty Wishon, meanwhile, sold only half as much as either of his rivals. “You have no idea the pressure Frosty was under,” Ron continues. “He came up to me at the end of the show and said, ‘Ron, I will never work with you again as long as I live.’ ”
No doubt Frosty Wishon was a charming and persuasive person, but he assumed that this was enough — that the rules of pitching were the same as the rules of celebrity endorsement. When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald’s hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil or Arnold Morris pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers — not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers — not once or twice but three or four times — and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.
Once, when I was over at Ron’s house in Coldwater Canyon, sitting on one of the high stools in his kitchen, he showed me what real pitching is all about. He was talking about how he had just had