Four little, and polite, words are all you need to instantly convince a pushy salesman to move along and leave you alone.

It’s pretty safe to say that no one really likes listening to sales pitches. Whether it’s a door-to-door salesman interrupting your personal time at home or a shop clerk jabbering away when you just want to browse in peace, a pushy salesperson can have you wanting to shout “Just shut up and leave me alone!”

Of course, being the civil and empathetic person you are, you wouldn’t actually hurl such harsh words at someone. Neither would Japanese Twitter user @papi_pirika, who’s developed two strategies to nip a sales pitch in the bud, one of which has turned out to be much more effective than the other.

Initially, @papi_pirika, who works as an illustrator, came up with what he thought was a pretty clever white lie. When an insistent salesperson came to his door and launched into his spiel, @papi_pirika told him “You know, I work in sales too. It’s a touch job, isn’t it?”

He figured that this would create a momentary feeling of solidarity and derail the sales pitch, and it did. The problem, though, was the salesman switched from a long sales pitch to a long list of gripes about working in the sales field, which meant that the conversation didn’t get any shorter.

So now @papi_pirika uses a different phrase, one which he says he7s had much better luck with. What is it? “Ima, mushoku nan desu,” which means:

“I’m unemployed right now.”

Getting sales revenue out of someone with no income of their own is only slightly easier than getting blood from a turnip, and @papi_pirika says his new technique is second in effectiveness only to ignoring the noise of someone knocking on his door or ringing his doorbell, which obviously isn’t an option if a clerk is hounding you while you’re browsing a store.

Best of all, it’s also a nice, nonconfrontational way of shutting down a salesperson’s speech in a mutually agreeable way. After all, whether the reason is because you’ve got no money to spend or simply want to make up your mind for yourself, the heart of the matter is that the salesperson is wasting both his energy and yours by talking to you, and the sooner that’s established, the sooner you can both move on to better uses of your time.

Source: Twitter/@papi_pirika via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s happy to talk to you whether you have a job or not.