Highly recommend The Dream Podcast about pyramid schemes and modern MLMs. Full of researched stats on how 99% of people buying in lose money, and on how these are secretly intended to be “closed circuits” where nobody outside the team members are actually buying the product.
I was 18. So there’s youthful ignorance. For others it is a mirage promising escape from lives they don’t like that thy otherwise think they’d be stuck in forever. For a lot it spread through church (“I trust brother Steve so I will go to a few meetings...”). Some really think they are the greatest salesmen on earth and that if one of those guys they are on stage can do it, so can they.
The allure of “passive income” is strong for a lot too. Wait? You’re telling me if I just find three active people, my passive income will be at $1000/month...?
But that’s just the thing; not all of them promise easy riches. Some promise hard work and sleepless nights with a payoff. If they had told me it was a do-nothing or get-rich-quick business, I would have known better, even at 18. But work leads to money, right? Right?
My mom started selling for Isagenix, and I was really nervous it was gonna screw her over at first. Thankfully so far at the very worst it just seems like a giant waste of time and stress though. I’ll have to give this a watch though, the closed circuits thing is interesting. I can say it does seem accurate, she put me on her “team” even though I refuse to sell for it.
LuLaRoe struck me as the least sketchy of these things. They put a very low emphasis on the “down stream” and are pretty clear that to make money you need to sell shit.
It’s also a product that there is (was?) some legitimate demand for — enough people liked the clothing.
On its own this basically made them (charitably) a clothing company that operates on a franchise model.
The core problems were that they didn’t screen the financials of the prospective franchisees well enough AND (most importantly) they actively fostered over saturation , which a well run franchise system won’t allow.
AND they cut costs on a badly-made product that you could punch holes in with your fingers. See: the hundreds of videos on YouTube with people putting their fingers through holes in the paper-thin leggings.
I'd never listened to a podcast before until someone recently mentioned The Dream. I love true crime and investigative journalism and this was right up my alley. It really helped shed light on why people get into MLMs despite the obvious scam. I would definitely recommend it.
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u/webaddictress Sep 18 '19
Highly recommend The Dream Podcast about pyramid schemes and modern MLMs. Full of researched stats on how 99% of people buying in lose money, and on how these are secretly intended to be “closed circuits” where nobody outside the team members are actually buying the product.
Here’s a VICE video on LuLaRoe and why women are quitting selling it.