While trying to learn how to sell I once tried to sell charity on the street for a single day.

Already in that first day one of the less attractive, but probably more skilled, co-workers told me that in most cases you're actually selling 'having an attractive person be very friendly to me for a while.'

> I once tried to sell charity on the street for a single day.

This sentence intrigues me. Were you working for a specific charitable organization or were you out there trying to sell one of the cardinal virtues as an abstract concept?

> in most cases you're actually selling 'having an attractive person be very friendly to me for a while.'

This is true, and it has been rediscovered over and over again in many industries in many ways. Some industries are really that and nothing else, and they have long, honored, and storied traditions in some cultures (so denigrating them means you're an ethnocentric swine, in case you missed my hint).

I don't know if it exists everywhere in the world, but this was basically an organization that would run campaigns for specific charities.

One week you'd try to get people to donate to a child cancer charity and the next to WWF and the sales company would get the first few months to half a year of that person's donations.

I'm not talking about PR people, I'm talking about promotional staff usually hired on a temporary basis. Most of what they do is hand out leaflets and goodies, and persuade people to visit the company's booth were the companies actual PR/marketing/sales people are.

At every place i've worked, people in marketing/sales are significantly better looking than in engineering jobs (by that I mean a significant number of people are significantly more attractive). The easy way to explain this is that being attractive is enough to get your foot in the door for a sales position. It also is worth noting that they are, on average, making much less money than the engineers, so it would be a resonable hypothesis that they are less driven to learn because they are good looking, thus end up in an easier job.

Its an interesting human trait that people who are attractive to us are able to sell us things easier than people who don't fit that quality.

Heck, an attractive woman can stop more people on the street and ask directions, and the person they stop will spend more time talking to them and helping them than they would with an average person.

And I think this behavior is true for men and women. It's not just a small segment of society that behaves that way, it's all of society.

So yes, it's true in PR and Advertising in general.

Attractive is subjective, but a (female) friend in PR told me that 80% of PR people are female. And given the well documented ageism in tech, young seems probable.