hooker-in

hooker-in (plural hookers-in)

1. (archaic) A person hired to bring customers into a store.
   • 1843, “Commercial Solicitors”, in The North of England Magazine, volume II, number XVI, page 419:

     These gentlemen are Hookers-in; or, as they more euphoniously style themselves, Commercial Solicitors. Their employers are the country trade merchants of Manchester; their duty is to stand at the door of their respective warehouses "from morn till dewy eve," there to take forcible possession of each and every passenger who may have the outward semblance of a country draper, or other consumer of Manchester goods, and to drag him into the establishment whose interest they have the honour to represent. […] Let it not be imagined that a hooker-in is a disreputable character—generally speaking he is quite the reverse.

   • 1854, Charles Dickens, “A Manchester Warehouse”, in Household Words, volume XXV, page 399:

     […] let us observe that the method of business at some of the second-rate houses is not always so straightforward. Many descend to the petty expedient of employing touters (hookers in, they are called), who frequent the railway stations and the coffee-rooms of inns, and hook in the unwary draper to their employers' dens. […] When the honest country draper meets with a hooker-in, when he is hooked by the button-hole on the railway platform, he had better beware.

   • 1938, George Burton Hotchkiss, Milestones of Marketing: A Brief History of the Evolution of Market Distribution, page 156:

     Then arose, early in the nineteenth century, a curious class of independent salesmen known as "hookers-in." These were employed by the textile warehouses of manufacturers and merchants to bring in new customers

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