A recent article by Professor Emeritus William Keep was published on SeekingAlpha, mentioning the significant drops in MLMs in North American and Asia/Pacific markets. Why is Europe not included? More on that later! You can read the article here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4722789-multi-level-marketing-stagnation-or-something-worse
You can also read my comment there, but I wanted to make a separate post about this topic, just in case the comment disappears and it’s about time I publish a post again.
My comment:
Good! It’s about time these scams get shut down. Why is everyone still pretending these are genuine businesses? Why keep harping on about it being an ‘industry’ and pretend that there’s ’investment opportunities’ and ‘foreclosures’ where businesses need to be rescued when in reality it’s all hot air?
They only ‘sell’ to their own adherents.
The ‘recruiting’ is not a ‘job’ or ‘business opportunity’, it’s binding consumers into a perpetual mill of having to buy more overpriced products or services with promises of riches that are only ever achieved by the top 1% or less.
We all know that 99.7% of people in these scams lose money or at most break even.
The money in these organisations comes from the bottom up, which real company has ‘downlines’ and ‘uplines’, where the money that goes into the organisation is only derived from the people who ‘buy into’ the organisation? Pour their money into the plan, to ‘invest in yourself by buying these products or services’ that they don’t need? With artificial quotas, monthly purchases, whether you need the products or not, because if you do not buy, you’re no longer on plan or valid, you’re out of the group if you don’t keep pumping money into the system… shall I just say it? The system is a pyramid scheme, hiding behind overpriced, essentially worthless products, that eat up people’s money, puts people in debt, piles out of cupboards and garages.
Why is it that only anti-MLM advocates who have been there, done it, experienced the losses, are the only ones shouting from the rooftops that these are essentially scams and they’ve robbed us, not only of our money, but years of employment status, because a CV that shows 10-15 years of MLM experience is not valid in the employment market, years of not spending quality time with our children, because all that time ‘working anywhere and any time’ is taking away from quality time with our families since we’re always expected to be ‘working our business’ for absolutely no reward, because all it comes down to is that we need to spend more money.
I’ll give you transparency about recruiting;
In Mary Kay in order to ‘move up the career path’ you need to recruit new adherents into the scheme; they need to put in a minimum amount (aka buy products) to “qualify” and as a ‘recruiter’ you need to also put in a minimum amount (aka buy more products over and above your minimum requirement to ‘stay active’) to “qualify” at your next ‘rank’ — in what business do you have to pay to qualify to get a promotion? At what REAL business do employees need to pay to ‘become active employees’?
Seriously, can the world of business, trade, economics, finance, marketing professionals, PLEASE open their eyes and stop treating these scams as real businesses and an industry?
You keep validating quacks selling air, water and soil, snake oil salesmen are not an industry, not an investment opportunity, they’re charlatans, frauds and they need to be treated as such!
Linked here as long as it remains available: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4722789-multi-level-marketing-stagnation-or-something-worse#comment-98739541
This is what has been bothering me for some time now. Why do these marketing experts, business experts, investment experts, government agencies , politicians, government officials and even journalists, shy away from the truth? Why are they not using the words that matter, by calling MLMs what they are and stop pretending that they are real businesses and that there is an ‘industry’, why are these people all going along with this Multilevel Make-believe World of Nonsense?
In truth, I’m not the only one who is bothered by this. Several anti-MLM advocates have spoken about this at the conference held in May of this year and on their own social media platforms.
I give you Marco Moukhaiber of “Always Marco” who put it so succinctly that it gave me goosebumps, I’m so glad did a little ‘do-over’ of his speech at the MLM Conference so you can see it here: https://youtu.be/db1MxRrlZlw
Marco mentions Scientology, well, that same MLM conference had a presentation by Chris Shelton, MSc in the Psychology of Coercive Control and this is what he had to say about MLMs a whole 5 years ago:
We’re not even asking to make tha cult analysis, just call MLMs out for what they are doing and stop whitewashing them. The MLMs are bad enough themselves for hiding behind legitimising double speak, we don’t need everyone else to follow suit and keep up the appearances.
Another example today; Julie Anderson pointed out how journalists keep praising MLMs instead of telling the truth about how these organisations operate and how they make people part with their hard earned money for no return, lying about “business opportunities “ and how you can “earn extra money working from home”, whilst fully continuing the legitimising of these inherent fraudulent practices.
Click the image to see the full video.
It is absurd how society seems to perpetuate these lies of these organisations where over 99% of people who participate are losing money day after day, over decades.
If we can’t get the press to use the right language when reporting on these practices, if we can’t get the FTC or Action Fraud to call a spade a spade, if our lawmakers don’t use the right language and our academics keep circling the truth by using misleading language, then HOW are we going to stop people from falling victim of these scams?
WORDS MATTER; call MLMs what they are: fraudulent pyramid schemes.
Any MLM adherent will tell you that their schemes is not a pyramid scheme, because pyramid schemes are illegal and they wouldn’t do anything illegal now, would they?. That’s what they’ve been coerced into saying, it literally is in the scripts they use to shut down critics.
That is one of the cult tactics these rackets use to manipulate the masses.
Call them cults, call them pyramid schemes, call them racketeers, quacks or charlatans, but let’s stop pretending that these are businesses in an industry that have a valid position in our society.
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