Eighty years ago this month, the May 1939 issue of Radio Retailing carried this feature explaining how salesmen from Austin, Minnesota, based Hormel Foods did their jobs.  To tell the story of “a new canned meat,” the salesmen brought along on their calls to grocers a portable phonograph and played a record of the canned meat’s story.  They “stood speechless while the record did the selling, softened up the prospect with suitable musical interludes.”

This salesman was employing an Emerson radio-phono.

While the meat is not identified in the caption, it is plainly visible in the photo, which reveals that the phonographic sales pitch was for Spam, the venerable luncheon meat which had been introduced by the company in 1937.