The humor website Cracked has a great article about America’s fastest growing industry.
No, it’s not health care. Or banking. Heck, it’s not even weed, which was my guess. It’s multi-level marketing.
You’ve probably seen these high-pressure sellers everywhere: on your Facebook page, at your job, and even in your own family. They are people like your recently unemployed uncle, looking to get back on his feet by selling over-priced vitamins via Amway. They’re like your sister-in-law, a stay-at-home mom trying to make some extra cash selling alarm systems. Or perhaps they’re your best friend, selling the latest and greatest in super health drinks, one that promises to cure all diseases–including the fake ones.
That was the case for me. I sat in the backseat of my best friend’s car on the way to go shopping. In the passenger seat sat another close girlfriend of hers. Before picking me up, they stopped by another friend’s house who is an authorized super health drink saleswoman and purchased two big bottles of the stuff. They wanted to know if I was interested in getting some for myself. Apparently, while they were being sold the juice, they were also recruited as sellers. I declined. I have been juicing for a while and had already perfected my own super juice formula, which cost only a fraction of what they paid for the pre-packaged bottles. However, that didn’t stop them from giving me the hard sell.
I was told that this super juice was made from some exotic berry that you could only get by scaling the highest mountain in the Maldives.
“But there are no mountains in Maldives,” I said. “Maybe they have hills.”
However, my friends didn’t let geographic inaccuracies get in the way of their potential sale. Instead, they switched their pitch and started telling me about the health benefits. It’s a super juice, my friend said. It’s a super juice that contains large amounts of antioxidants, which detox the system and fight the free radicals that cause aging — because everybody knows that being a radical is bad. It also cures depression, headaches, stomach flu, food poisoning, toe fungus, shingles, Tourette syndrome, Parkinson disease, herpes, ALS, Ebola, cerebral palsy, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and seven types of cancer. I picked up the bottle and looked at the sugar content. “It might cure cancer and all, but you will definitely get a bad case of diabetes,” I said, half-jokingly.
Neither of them laughed.
Instead, they continued on with their dubious medical claims, claims they’d been fed by the seller who signed them up for the program. I asked them if the seller was a doctor or worked in the medical profession, to which my best friend responded, “Oh no, she does hair out of her house. But she has proof that it works. A friend of a friend’s mom’s sister had breast cancer and started drinking two bottles of the stuff a day.”
“Oh, so she’s cured?” I asked.
“No, she passed away, ” she said. “But the juice helped to give her relief.”
*Hard blink*
“The only thing that juice helped to relieve her of is the money she could have left to her family as inheritance,” I retorted.
I know, that was bad. However, there is nothing more irksome in this world than people selling snake oil to you…
On second thought, I can think of something more annoying: close friends and family members trying to sell snake oil to you. You are no longer their favorite cousin or best friend. Instead, you are a potential sale, or worse, a chump. The whole thing reminds me of a QVC film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where an alien species infiltrates your people’s bodies and turns them into Vince Offer, aka, the ShamWow! guy.
And according to the article on Cracked, the invasion is spreading. Multi-level marketing (MLM) is not just a side hobby, but a $30 billion dollar a year global industry with 10 million people in the USA and 20 million worldwide working as “independent salespeople.” They hawk everything from super juice and makeup to jewelry and vitamins.
Unlike pyramid schemes, which are illegal, these “businesses” actually sell you products, which is a great way to keep the feds off of their a**es. However, many of these MLM businesses are just as predatory as your average Ponzi scheme. The only way to truly make money is by recruiting other independent salespeople and taking a cut of the money they make.
And in spite of the promise of big and easy money, as the Cracked article notes, it is rare that people actually make any money at all. In fact:
Herbalife, the company getting lawsuited all over the place that we discussed above? Of all their sellers, 99.92 percent lose money. And that is just when you are a part of the scheme. When I asked friends about their experiences working for these types of businesses, most of them said they had hundreds, even thousands of dollars’ worth of stock left after they finally got out. The companies were not about to buy that back — they just had to add the loss to their other ones.
I get the attraction. You can stay at home with your kids and go off to girly get-togethers at night and drink wine, and it seems like the perfect way to supplement your income. That’s why these things have been around and popular for almost 100 years. But there are flexible part-time jobs, even work from home jobs that pay regularly and don’t require you to invest your own money.So, please. Learn from the mistakes of those who went before you. There is no get-rich-quick scheme that works, and these companies virtually always leave you worse off than before.
Sounds like good advice to me. I tried to tell my girlfriends this, but you know, you can’t tell Black folks nothin’…
