View source for Spiff

{{Short description|Immediate bonus for a sale}}
{{Other uses|Spiff (disambiguation)}}

A '''spiff''', or '''spiv''', is slang for an immediate bonus for a sale.  Typically, spiffs are paid, either by a manufacturer or employer, directly to a salesperson for selling a ''specific'' product.  It is sometimes given as SPIF or SPIFF, a [[backronym]], with invented words to fit the letters.

==Origin==
An early reference to a spiff can be found in a [[slang]] [[dictionary]] of 1859; "The percentage allowed by [[draper]]s to their young men when they effect sale of old fashioned or undesirable stock."<ref name=OED>Oxford English Dictionary (1989) 2nd edition</ref>  An article in the ''[[Pall Mall Gazette]]'' of 1890 on the practices in London shops uses the term:
<blockquote>a "spiff" system is usually adopted, spiffs being premiums placed on certain articles, ''not'' of the last fashion, indicated by a marvelous hieroglyphic put on the price ticket.  These marks are well known by the assistant, and the almost invisible mystic sign explains why an article, wholly unsuitable, is foisted on the jaded customer as "just the thing."<ref name=PallMall>''Pall Mall Gazette'' (London, England), Wednesday, April 2, 1890, ''The Ladies Corner: Round the Clock with a London Draper''</ref>
</blockquote>
The [[Oxford English Dictionary]] suggests that (apart from a corruption of ''specific'') it could be connected with the use of the word in that period to mean a [[dandy]] or somebody smartly dressed (hence spiffy, and to spiff up - to improve the appearance of a place or a person), but nobody seems to have been able to disentangle the threads of which came first, or what influenced what, or where the word originally came from.<ref name=OED/><ref name=DMirror>Daily Mirror, 11 Jan 1963, p 16 "Where the spivs began"</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

==Further reading==
* {{cite book |first1=Andris A. |last1=Zoltners |first2=Prabhakant |last2=Sinha |first3=Sally E. |last3=Lorimer |date=2006 |title=The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans that Work |publisher=Amacon |isbn=0814473245 }}
* {{cite journal |first1=Fabio |last1=Caldierero |first2=Anne T. |last2=Coughlan |date=2007-01-01 |journal=Marketing Science |volume=26 |issue=1 |pages=31–51 |title=Spiffed-Up Channels: The Role of Spiffs in Hierarchical Selling Organizations |doi=10.1287/mksc.1060.0204 }}

[[Category:Employment compensation]]