Across season 4 of
Better Call Saul Jimmy is scrambling to find work while he's suspended from practicing law. He's offered a job selling copiers after he makes
an amazing interview-rescue sales pitch in ep. 4.02— but he turns it down! Instead he takes a job at a local mobile phone store, CC Mobile.
Fans may have different opinions about why he turned down one to take the other. Sure, Jimmy stated a reason when he turned down the copier sales job, but I believe the answer is
laziness. The copier job was field sales. Field sales is
hard. You've got to prospect for leads, make lots of cold calls, travel in the field to visit prospects and close deals, and on top of all that the pay is likely mostly commission based— meaning, if you don't put in 150% effort, you don't get paid much. Yeah, retail can suck dealing with customers, but honestly— having personally worked both— retail is easier. You have fixed hours, and when your shift is over you're done
Drumming Up Business at the Mobile Phone Store
Jimmy gets more than he bargained for in choosing the easier job, though. The store he's assigned to is dead. He goes
days without seeing a customer. Probably some of his pay is sales based, so he's likely making less than he expected. And he's bored. Jimmy loves to cut corners... but he cuts corners to succeed at tough jobs, not to opt out of working— or out of making money.
In ep. 4.04 Jimmy gets an idea to drum up business at the store with a novel sales pitch.
He's worked with a local thief to steal an item from the Neff Copiers office— yes, he couldn't help but notice something he could steal while he was interviewing there! When Jimmy says, basically, "I'll call you again next time," the thief responds that he'll need to go through an intermediary because he's destroyed his mobile phone. "New job, new phone," the thief explains. Jimmy ponders this and comes up with the idea of pitching disposable mobile phones to people concerned about government monitoring.
In more recent years this "Is the man listening?" pitch might find a cottage-industry business with conspiracy theorists. In this story, in 2003/2004, it's still kind of a dud. Jimmy does get one interested customer, though. It's a construction contractor who intimates that he's not reporting all his income to the tax authorities. "Slippin' Jimmy" plays up how much the IRS investigates people and what the consequences are, and cons the man on the idea of throwing out his phone every month. The man leaves with a stack of prepaid phones.
Selling Phones on the Street
This gives Jimmy an even better idea for how to move phones faster.
Instead of waiting for government conspiracy theorists and tax dodgers to wander into his store, Jimmy goes out on the street to sell phones to drug dealers, gang members, and other probable criminals hanging out on the streets late at night. He even refines his pitch to peddle these phones as contraband for criminal associates serving time in prison. The phones are prepaid, and they're the smallest phones, he boasts— easiest to hide in... uh,
anywhere. 😨 They sell like hotcakes.
Because what Jimmy's doing is dodgy he does it outside of his job at the mobile phone store. He makes up his own business cards for it:
Jimmy uses the Saul Goodman moniker for this business. It's only the second time he's used that name; the first being
his short-lived TV ad reselling business. Presumably he's changing his name again because he wants to keep this separate from his career as a lawyer. If nothing else, doing business with a bunch of criminals would violate his probation, which would wreck his getting his law license back. Plus, it's broadly implied that Jimmy is buying the phones himself from the store and selling them on the street at a markup, so he needs to keep his name off that so as not to jeopardize his job with the phone store where he buys the phones cheap.
Jimmy Gets Into Trouble Selling Phones (Because Of Course)
Alas, "Jeopardy" is kind of Jimmy's middle name. He gets into trouble hawking these phones. First, he gets mugged by a trio of low level street thugs who look a lot like the bullies from
The Simpsons. He hires a few bigger thugs to get revenge on the bullies. So far so good. But then one thug he keeps on retainer for protection, Huell Babineaux— whom we know from
Breaking Bad becomes Jimmy's long term security guy— assaults a plain-clothes police officer who's asking Jimmy to stop selling drop phones to criminals. Huell gets arrested.
There's risk to Jimmy in Huell's arrest. Huell warns Jimmy he'll skip out on bail if there's a chance he'll be sentenced to prison— which is highly likely because he's assaulted a police officer and has a prior conviction for theft. Jimmy worries that Huell skipping town would bounce back on him, wrecking his probation and chance at rebuilding his law career. Plus, it's not said in the show, but if Huell goes to trial instead of settling through a plea bargain, his testimony could wreck Jimmy's chances, too.
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