5:51 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Adventures in Contract Enforcement: It all started as an uneventful Halloween. Then Cookie Monster repossessed our television...

On Halloween night in 1991, three Rent-A-Center employees in Utica, N.Y., dressed up, respectively, as the Cookie Monster, a gorilla and an alien life form and knocked on a customer's door. Once inside, they successfully repossessed a home-entertainment system on which payments hadn't been made in almost three months. Gary Gerhardt, the store manager who blessed this plan, calls the ruse "a last-ditch effort," adding, "it was the only way we could think to get someone in the door."

From Alix M. Freedman, A Marketing Giant Uses its Sales Prowess to Profit on Poverty, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22, 1993, p. A12.