Businessmen Get a Chill in Boston, Warm Up to S.F.

People in San Francisco are friendly, they’re hard to impress in Chicago, paranoid in New York, unforgiving in Minneapolis and extremely apologetic in Cleveland, a poll of traveling salesmen says.

A research psychologist asked 2,610 business travelers, most of them male salesmen in their 40s, to rate the major U.S. cities in which they do business and, occasionally, step out for socializing.

The results, published in Forbes magazine, showed that West Coast cities have more friendly people than East Coast cities, among which Boston was cited as the most unfriendly city in which to do business.

Washington ranked as second most unfriendly. Survey respondents described it as a place where everyone smiles on the surface while secretly assessing status, power and money.

San Francisco was ranked as the nation’s most friendly place to do business, while Minneapolis was most unforgiving because “if your business goes bust, you’d be well advised to move.”

Participants said Chicago treated salesmen “in a cavalier fashion.” New Yorkers “think you’ll pick their pockets or sell them a watch that only works for three weeks,” one salesman said.

Cleveland suffers from a major inferiority complex.

“More than half the people you do business with in Cleveland apologize for the place when you visit them,” one salesman said.

One respondent said Philadelphia is the only city where corporate managers ask to be “traded” instead of “transferred.”

Participants were asked to make up slogans for cities starting with the words: “Keep it. . . . “

Of Los Angeles, they said “Keep it cool,” for New York “Keep it moving” and for the nation’s capital “Keep it to yourself.”