Back when I got to Hood in the early 90's, there was like 4 scum-fuck Senior NCO's selling Herbalife and Amway. These 4 guys were the worst caricatures of abusive shamming faggot SNCO's you've ever seen. They had that shit on the sides of their cars with stickers, would constantly try to push that shit on the lower enlisted. And I'm sorry, but all lower enlisted are borderline retarded. We're talking buying cars at 22% interest, credit cards at 35%, shit like that, and these four constantly tried to con 17-19 year olds to join their "limited business opportunity!"
A Captain and a Major in 1st Cavalry Division got into Amway, and they were featured by Amway as proof Amway works because supposedly they were able to retire due to the amount of money they were making with Amway. All of the Amway people were always showing a blurrily photocopied page with the "newspaper article" of the supposed "retirement party" of the officers that looked more like a wedding and I noticed the rank changed depending on who was telling it.
It got bad enough that the Brigade Commander came down on that shit. No more putting that shit on the side of cars, no more handing out business cards or trying to recruit people.
I remember when Dish Network was kind of an MLM scam. Again, in the 90's. You'd have guys contacting you, talking about selling you a "franchise license" to sell Dish Network dishes in your local area. Of course, if people got good penetration, Dish Network put in an official office and the guy who spent all the time selling the dishes got booted and his license revoked.
Web-TV was another one that was everywhere. Selling internet to grandma's for their shitty grand-kids to connect to AOL and the internet. They operated just like Amway, forcing you to buy the Web-TV consoles and then go door to door selling them.
One thing I've noticed over the years, is they always hold a kind of low-key recruitment with a few precisely chosen people in Middle Class areas, but in the lower income areas, they take out ads and shit and do recruitment drive blitzes to get as many people as they can to sign up. Those drives are a bonanza for someone, since if you do it right (And I've seen entire hotel auditoriums filled up with prospective clients) you can sell two or three hundred "starter packs" a month. That's where the money really is, not convincing a handful of friends to sell whatever it is your selling, but selling the base kits, since they're the most expensive and have the most markup. (I've gone to one or two of them for free donuts and to go with friends so I could talk them out of it)
They do this with a shotgun approach in the lower income areas (Areas around military bases are overrun with dependents shilling MLM crap).
They do the whole "It's not a pyramid scheme, it's multi-level-marketing!" thing, because pyramid schemes are illegal. They talk all about how their products are so important nobody will be able to turn them down.
But the big thing they do, is "passive income". THIS is why the recruitment is so hard, and you end with everyone in need of a few extra bucks are involved in it and trying to sell. For those of you that don't know how this goes:
They tell you that everything you sell, you have to buy the item, you sell it, part of the profit goes to the guy above you, you keep the rest. However, if you convince someone to sell under you, then you get a cut of everything they sell. If you get 10 people, you get a percentage of what they sell. However, IF you can convince those 10 to get 10 people selling, you also get the additional income from them. So you're getting a cut of 110 people's work. JUST LIKE A REAL BUSINESS!
See how if you don't understand exponential growth works, this sounds great. I know Amway promised you a cut of the work from up to three levels down, don't know about any of the others. They also claimed that because you were running a real business, even your kids/grandkids could inherit your true and honest business.
Now, here's where it gets even scummier.
They know most of the people who get into this aren't going to really do their books close, so they encourage you constantly to reinvest what you earn back into buying more product, more start kits, all to sell. They actually teach people accounting, but wrong, meaning a LOT of these people are shocked when they discover they've actually LOST money, no matter how much they sell, not matter how many tens of thousands of dollars of product they move. See, they aren't making money for them, they're making money for the people above them. And the people above them encourage their "downline" to pour everything into the "business" with the MLM. Every last penny you have should be poured into the business. With Amway, you shouldn't buy anything in the store you could buy out of the Amway catalogue.
I've heard of people taking out a mortgage on their house to plow back into their "business" in order to boost profits.
It's run like a cult, big time.
Nobody makes money except for the "Diamond/Ruby Distributors", most of whom have the same pictures as they've had since the 1970's.
These new companies like Younique and the essential oil business don't actually make any money for anyone but the people who manufacture the shit they sell, and the people who initially came up with the scam as well as the early adopters.
In a way, it's like bitcoin. The only people to make money are the people who run massive server farms (con a whole neighborhood into buying starter packs), who got in early when nobody else was doing it, or the people selling the hardware used to mine.
There's an old saying about this shit: "The only people who made money during the Gold Rush were the guys selling shovels."
"
