Hi friends! Are you getting swarmed with people in your lives who are hawking MLM crap this year? It feels like it’s gotten progressively worse and I’m assuming it’s because the economy is so bad that their predatory tactics.
I am expecting it to get worse in the next few weeks with the usual “New Year New You Lose Weight with Our (vitamins/shakes/essential oils/etc etc) Products! Be a Boss Babe!”
ALSO I have a few friends who are obsessed with some new “fitness shake” businesses where thy go and get their fancy smoothies and I’m pretty sure it’s just Herbalife stuff rebranded as a different name.
The fake feminism of it all pisses me off, too. #bossbabe, etc marketing is bullshit.
Link if you want some additional reading
https://time.com/5864712/multilevel-marketing-schemes-coronavirus/
Nope, not on my end of the universe. Generally speaking, our stream of spam in almost any form is pretty small because we’ve kept a low online profile. So, what little of that shit which does come our way is pretty well filtered out by Gmail, or number blocking apps. It’s pretty nice.
Apropos of nothing, the Dallas Cowboys are officially out of the playoffs. All they had to do was just win their game today, against an equally shitty opponent, and they just couldn’t pull it off. To that I say: Welcome to the Mike McCarthy Era, Dallas. I hope it is just as long, and painful and futile as it was in Green Bay.
When I was young and desperate, I was recruited to sell knives (Cutco) and spent a month as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman (Kirby.)
When I was fired from my first job, I was recruited for an MLM (Amway.) I bought the beginner kit, but that was as far as it went as no one I knew cared for or wanted to buy anything with Amway, even mom.
The Kirby job was the worst job I had as I learned I can’t sell much and that the vaunted “commission” are only good if the team leader (the guy driving the van) doesn’t throw it away to get the sale. It taught this naive boy a lot of things like I made the right choice to run away from a cougar (the boss’ wife) who apparently loved naive stupid boys like me and how to deal with constant rejection (although those lessons didn’t sink in when dealing with the opposite sex till my early 30s.)
I did a month with Tri-Star vacuum cleaner company. My boss was the Salesman of the Year, and yet was living out of a motel room with his family and when I was with him on a grocery shopping trip (don’t ask), his credit card got rejected and cut up in front of us. That cured me of the starry-eyed fantasy that I could make a killing.
As for the constant rejection, dealing with the opposite sex certainly didn’t help me deal with it. One of the bonuses of being married is that I don’t have to worry about that particular form of rejection again.
We have neighbors/acquaintances who do those…the 31 handbags, and there is a cookware one and even a shaker basket one. I feel bad saying no thank you to their home or online sales parties. But really, I plot my gift giving all year long in order to get the best present for people. And over-priced MLM stuff just makes me feel sad for the sellers and the buyers. As @ManchuCandidate said, the entire concept is fraught with desperation.
31 is just so obnoxiously Jesus-ey to me also, based on the few parties I’ve been roped into attending.
I haven’t bought anything, just been roped into attending a few (pre-covid) due to friends and family.
We’ve had a steady stream of cold callers selling solar panels. After hearing 4 different pitches I still can’t trust any of em.
On a side note, my (only) email has been bombarded with spam. So much so that I want to abandon the address. In a screwed up way, it’s given me a new found respect for introverts.
I keep seeing the same ads for two different products (Glamnetics, magnetic eyelashes, and The Grove cleaning products), but they are always from different people/sites. I can’t figure out if these are MLM products or dropship sites, but it’s pissing me off bc no matter how much you try to block or ignore one ad, it’s like a hyrda. 500 more like it waiting for you. I am not even sure why the algorithm thinks I would want magnetic falsies.
Huh, I needed to google what the fuck dropshipping was and now I learned something today.
I think the magnetic lashes are an MLM, but I think some beauty supply stores might also have some from a different brand?
Ugh. I’ve had a few that have been doing the jewelry ones and supplements ones for a few years now, but I politely declined and that was that. I only had one new one this past year – an old high school acquaintance who messaged me on facebook. She lulled me into a false sense of security with several back and forths about my kid and hers before revealing she was selling children’s books. I was like uhhhh that’s some MLM shit (but more politely). She tried to convince me it somehow wasn’t an MLM (it undeniably is), and did not take no easily.
I want to shake all of them out of it. I don’t know how anyone gets involved with this crap anymore. It’s so depressing.
They really target women, especially moms. Like I’ve gotten “hey mama!” messages from a few of them and I’m like why do you think I have kids??? Then I realized that’s just the template/training they use when talking to other women.
Yesss. It’s really gross. She very clearly had been fed lines about how great the business model is for moms, which she dutifully parroted. I didn’t get a ton of it because she was trying to just get me to buy books to start with anyway, but she was defending against the accusation of it being a pyramid scheme.
But I’ve definitely also just run into it online. MLMs really like moms.
Have you seen the show On Becoming a God in Central Florida? It’s funny and over the top but also captures the desperation and cult aspect of MLMs.
I’ve always been too cynical to get involved in selling them. I don’t have a big online presence so I’m not really a target either.
The crazy thing is that I’ve periodically been tasked with translating stuff for Amway – from Spanish into English.
The big project I did a few weeks ago involved the transcription of a couple of videos made by a guy who’s apparently near the top of the pyramid (heh) in his country, which netted me even more than this latest fucking “stimulus” payment has. Of course, for every one of those, there’s also a letter regarding someone whose business was terminated by Amway for not following the rules, oftentimes these days asking what the fuck they’re supposed to do with all this unsold merchandise in the midst of a goddamn pandemic.
This stimulus payment is such a joke. I’ll probably get my check in mid-February based on how long the last payment took to get to me.
I gave ’em my banking information just because I didn’t want to get a check with his fucking name on it. And when his little letter came in the mail afterwards, I shredded the damn thing without even opening it.
What I am being pestered with lately is spam calls of “expired car warranty”. UGH. I’ve blocked so many damn numbers and they just. keep. calling. My current car is 14 years old, ffs, and my previous car I had purchased 6 years ago was totaled 2 1/2 years ago. I definitely don’t have any car warranties lol
LEAVE ME ALONE SPAMMERS
I get a ton of those car warranty calls too, plus calls from “visa mastercard” (they’re one company now huh?) about problems with my account, and my favorite: my social security number has been suspended for suspicious activity and there’s a warrant for my arrest.
i dont know? ive got add blockers running…and my spam email account has so many unread emails i can almost use this meme
my official email isnt much better…..really….you need to call me if you want me to notice
and on that note…its been a while since i had random indian sounding guys calling me to tell me my windows pc has a problem…..i kinda miss them
I had a girlfriend in high school/college that got sucked into Mary Kay, and it gave me a healthy wariness toward MLM scams. Mary Kay was particularly pernicious because it traded so much on flattery and ego (“oh, you’re so pretty, you’d be great at this, it will just sell itself if you say you use it, blah, blah”). I also have very little patience with MLMs as a result and get pretty short with anyone who tries to get me involved in any of them.
Probably the saddest incident I recall was a woman whose daughter was friends with my daughter and whose husband died, leaving her short on money. She was then laid off. She tried to use Facebook to promote an MLM party (don’t recall which). and got no response (in a rare display of personal tact due to her personal situation I chose to simply ignore it rather than render an opinion). Then she posted a screed about how people were encouraging her to take steps to help herself but when she tried no one was willing to come to her party.
Uh, nope. If you come to me asking for help with your resume or job-hunting assistance or even a recommendation (IF I know you well enough), I’ll help with that. But I’m not signing on to an MLM. That’s just throwing away your money and annoying the shit out of me. Which several people told her, in no uncertain terms. I believe she eventually found a job, fortunately (I muted or unfriended her or maybe she quit Facebook or something, I don’t know — our daughters parted ways as kids do). But MLMs prey on people at low points, and I think there are a lot of people at low points right now.
Yeah that’s my thing. It’s so fucking predatory.
I have a few friends who do them because they just like the products. Okay cool. Like I didn’t even know they sold it because they don’t blow up facebook about it. They’re not thinking it will get them rich. They’re just going to buy that product anyways so might as well get the discount that sellers get. Cool beans.
But for most people — it’s literally fleecing them of money they can’t afford.
Yeah. I used to go to flea markets once in a while, and I occasionally saw people selling Mary Kay for pennies on the dollar trying to make some of their money back. Big red flag there.
Ten years or so ago I did PR and marketing for a couple up and coming race car drivers, and one of them got involved with a company called One24, which sold an “energy boost” product they compared to 5-Hour Energy and something they described as a “Super Food Blend”. The second I saw the materials I knew this was a MLM scheme, but his teammate was doing it and already received a check, and when you’re a driver struggling to make budget, you refuse to listen to reason.
So I wrote a press release or two, stuck the logo on the website and in his marketing materials. His family and friends might have purchased some product, but I don’t think he ever saw a dime.