I’ve always hated and had contempt for multi level marketing (aka pyramid schemes) and have recently fallen into the black hole of https://old.reddit.com/r/antiMLM/ subreddit. After listening to the investigative podcast “The Dream” series (8 episodes so far) I now have more empathy for its victims.
Thanks Betsy Devos.
More empathy and a LOT more anger on how exploitative all of their practices are.
I highly recommend “The Dream.” Multiple episodes focusing on economically-depressed Michigan.
Forgot to link it: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream
Co-produced by Stitcher but can be listened to on any of your favourite podcast platforms/apps without needing to go through Stitcher.
I agree with the thread title! (But I also think that any kind of cold call solicitations and spam email should be illegal as well.)
Yea, we live in the heartland of MLM insanity. I had a doctor back in Ann Arbor once and he whined that he wasn’t making enough money. So every time I had to see him he’d pull out the big Amway book, but instead of flat out saying it was Amway (because by then people would instantly run away) they had some other term, and they didn’t even mention the soap products.
In the end he drags me to a “seminar”, and it is stupid beyond belief. They have these “tiers” Ruby level, Sapphire level, Diamond level, and people go up on stage and hoot and holler about their level and how awesome it is. People are cheering like it’s VE day. Like crazy brainwash stuff.
At any rate I saw what was going on and told him I wasn’t interested, and still he wouldn’t let it go. Nothing like going for healthcare and having an idiot pitch you on a scam. Made me real confident in his abilities (not).
One thing that just astounded me, is he would keep telling me how he was going to become a super rich multi-millionaire by doing this “Amway, not Amway stuff”. I kept thinking, “Dude, just specialize instead of being GP and you’ll be wealthy”, but I got the impression he didn’t want to do any more work. He just wanted the supposed free money to roll in. And really that’s what it is. The promise of doing almost no work and having lots of cash come your way.
Yeah but what if it makes your wife, like, feel good, man?
Burn it all down, IMO.
I’ve been listening to The Dream, a bit more than halfway through. @rei is right, it’s worth your time. Been affected enough that I wrote about it:
TL;DR - MLM preys on those who feel they have no prospects, mostly in an economic sense, though there’s a social aspect as well. That leaves them susceptible to the siren song of the “hit it big” promise of an MLM. If we want to prevent it, we need to work on getting society to a point where people don’t see MLM as their best alternative.