e. "Always Be Closing." Implicit in this acronym is the idea that one must live and breathe sales. It's a 24-hour commitment.
This A-B-C lifestyle raises many interesting questions about morality and business ethics. It's clear that Blake is an amoral (perhaps immoral) S.O.B. By the way he talks down to the sales crew. He doesn't want a "nice guy," he wants a salesman. Are the two mutually exclusive? In real life, it doesn't appear that they should be exclusive concepts. There are plenty of nice salesmen in the world, people who take their fiduciary responsibilities seriously and put their clients needs before their own sales driven agenda.
However, in Glengarry Glen Ross, it's implied that to be successful one has to be morally agnostic, greedy, and downright predatory (like Blake himself) on a 24/7 basis. And looking at this in the context of achieving the American dream, one could argue that Glengarry Glen Ross teaches the viewer that in order to be successful, in order to be prosperous, in order to earn a cup of coffee, one has to be like Blake, one has to put morality on the backburner and on has to...
There is a reason why people still flock to see this movie and play. That's because it's as true to life and as prescient now, as it was when it was first released in 1984. America, over the past three decades, has taken Blake's lessons to seriously. We've become a nation that values money and celebrity and social status above all else. The result of this misplacement of values (greed in place of temperance, vanity in place of humility, selfishness in place of charity) has manifested in many ways, the most obvious would be the collapse of the stock market in 2008. Too many people believe in C4C and live an A-B-C lifestyle.
Toward the end of the play, Shelley Levene says to Williamson, "A man IS his job and you are fucked at yours." The astute viewer, the morally in-touch viewer, the socially responsible viewer, would like to say, "No, Mr. Levene, a man is SO much more than his job. Those who derive their self-worth from their wallet have things backwards."
