Multi-Level MarketingFollow

Multi-Level Marketing is the business model used by Avon, Tupperware, Amway, Herballife etc. The model is built on levels of distributors. If one were to make a visual of the distribution of distributors it would like very much like a pyramid.

In the world of supply -demand economics it's not really a viable model due to product demand, market saturation etc. Yet the companies themselves survive.

In 1979 The FTC ruled that Amway, as long as it maintained a certain level of sales of it's products to the general public and quit fudging the amount of money it's distributor's were making, was not a pyramid scheme.

Most recently Herbalife has been coming under fire for it's business plan. Some market speculators think the pyramid is getting ready to collapse.

Do you buy stuff from an MLM or have you ever sold stuff for them? Maybe recruited an underling, etc?

I have a bunch of Tupperware I bought in high school when a girlfriend decided to be a seller. I still have some it. The stuffs expensive but will seriously last you forever. My mom used to have all sorts of home parties where stuff was being sold - I remember not only Avon and Tupperware, but Sarah Coventry Jewelry and Home Decor stuff (not sure of the name). Most all of these companies would tempt you to be a distributor so you could get a discount on all the stuff they convinced you that you needed to have.

I never contemplated being a seller/distributor, but I'm really bad at salesmanship.




Edited, Jan 6th 2014 9:38pm by Elinda

I don't. The products are overpriced, the sales people pushy, and in the case of Herbalife, it's just a giant scam.

My oldest sister just tried to get me in on a MLM thing for some herbal supplement she takes. I told her I could go to the plant store, obtain the specific herbs in her fancy blend, dry them out, and make a six months supply of the herbal mix myself for about $20.

(But the potency! the purity! this is concentrated! they wail.)

I think I read the "what the wealthy do that the poor don't" article.

The problem is that they confused correlation with causation. Yeah, the wealthy read more nonfiction books each year. If it's anything like my job, they get to count that reading as work time. (I'm slogging through Land on your feet, not on your face at the moment myself. For work.)

I've been to one of the "sex parties" before. They're actually kind of fun, if the sales lady is good at her job. It wasn't a friend doing the selling, though. It was some place you contacted to come and host the party at your house. I think it was a bridal shower or something. They had all kind of stuff, vibrators, ***** and ****** wind-up toys, ***** pasta, french ticklers, lingerie. I got this neat feather with some chocolate-flavored powder. You were supposed to use the feather to dust it over your partner then lick it off. The powder tasted awful, but the feather was a lot of fun.

Edited, Jan 6th 2014 4:47pm by Belkira

Giggity.

No, the more likely explanation is that Tom Corley and Dave Ramsey are liars.

Edited, Jan 6th 2014 5:43pm by Allegory

One of my distant relatives (2nd, 3rd cousin? Can't remember) got into some MLM Cash for Gold thing. Would host "Gold Parties" and constantly spam Facebook about how you could join her and make tons of money (and of course she'd take some sort of cut). All you had to do was pay for this kit and testing material, and get your friends to come to you with all their gold so you could tell them what it was worth and give them cash for it all.

I never bothered talking to her about it, and eventually had to remove her from my friends list. But I was kind of curious what sort of rip off price they were offering for the gold they received, after every "tier" took there cut from the true value.

My old roommate got into both Amway, which I told him was a pyramid scheme, and worked the Cutco "Knife Job" for a bit. To be fair, the knife job was vector marketing rather than MLM, but still a really dumb thing to get into, IMO.

My sister was trying to sell herbalife for a time. I'm not really sure what her long term plan was with it, but thankfully it fizzled before she got in too deep. There's still a ton of junk herbalife products between her house and my mom's that I assume she ended up paying for herself. She doesn't talk much about it, but I remember seeing the labels and thinking "wow this is some craps".

We gave up on HP inkjets and switched to a color laser printer when the last one died.

If we're going to pay $100 for a color cartridge, it might as well last for more than a month.

My sister used to do Amway back in the day. Not surprisingly, she didn't make any money at it. Amway at least had the virtue that if you were going to buy those kinds of items anyway, you could get a discount buying it through them. I'm not sure if it was worth the trouble, but at least there was sufficient variety of items that you could maybe justify it that way.

The ones you really want to stay away from are the ones where the product being sold is secondary to other buy-in or membership costs. I remember someone trying to sell me on one of these sorts of schemes, and it was like pay $100/month to be a member, which entitled you to order stuff and sell it. But the catalog info was vague as hell, and it was clear that the real intent was to get people to sign up more people, with each getting a piece of the membership cost of those they brought in. The products for sale were so obviously just an afterthought in order to make it technically legal that it was laughable. Always a bad sign...

My friend spent the summer after high school selling the Cutco knives. Pretty much out of boredom, I guess.

Etsy has to be one of the most depressing things on the internet. Hilarious and depressing.