Книга раскрывает, как схемы сетевого маркетинга превращают личные отношения в финансовые транзакции

Years ago, Packrat and I were having dinner with some neighbors. They each took a handful of herbal supplements, and mentioned that if it helped them lose weight, they would start selling them. I assume the herbs didn’t work, because we didn’t spend the rest of our lives being harangued to buy them and/or join the pyramid of sales people. Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read didn’t contain any real surprises, but it’s a solid examination of the phenomenon of “multilevel marketing”. But first, a word from our sponsor! Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site’s best, funniest, most mojo’d & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! Here’s the new & improved DK6 version of how to submit nominations: If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail dot comeither search for user @topcomments, or click this link then click “send message”!) by 9:30pm Eastern.. Please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find! The book follows Monique, who joined Mary Kay in 2013 as an “independent beauty consultant.” As with other MLMs, there are almost no employees, only “independent contractors.” Each is expected to purchase thousands of dollars worth of beauty products, theoretically for resale, but the company doesn’t actually care if the contractors ever sell any of it – the company already has their money. There’s a huge amount of pressure to move up the chain by recruiting other contractors, with fancy titles and tokens dangled as incentive, and get-togethers where the higher-ups lavish praise and brag about their own wealth. Companies like Mary Kay and Amway stay just this side of the legal line because ostensibly they sell an actual product, and their regulations state that contractors can’t just sell to other contractors (but there’s no way to actually enforce that part). In fact, most of Amway’s profit is not from selling cleaning products, but from selling motivational recordings, books and seminars to their own employees – er, “independent contractors”. Lots of high-pressure “visualize success” talk, coupled with the message that if you’re not making sales, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough, and you need more motivational seminars. (A Fundamentalist acquaintance once told me she “could get more inspiration from an Amway meeting than from church.”) Amway lucked out in a couple of other ways. In the 1970s, they formed a cozy relationship with their Congressman – Gerald Ford. They cultivated other politicians, almost always Republicans, and bent their ear about not going too far with consumer protection laws. They have close connections with organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Amway co-founder Richard DeVos is the father of Michigan politician Dick DeVos, and the father-in-law of Betsy Prince DeVos. The MLM companies are mostly spinoffs of each other. Someone tried to work their way up in a company selling vitamins, realized that only the people at the very top made money, and then set themselves up at the top of a new company selling cookware or skincare products or whatever. One thing that comes up is how MLMs turn all the contractors’ relationships into transactions. When contractors can’t sell a useless product, they’ll push friends and family members to buy them, and then to take slots below them in the selling pyramid. Soon they’re casting a wider net to everyone they can think of. I had two former classmates suddenly anxious to friend me on Facebook. One sent a touching note about how she’d “thought of me often” in the 20+ years we hadn’t been in contact. Neither of them had been the worst of the Mean Girls, but we definitely hadn’t been friends. I didn’t respond, so I can’t swear they were going to hit me with an MLM pitch, but that sort of approach is standard operating procedure. The book mentions a woman who was looking to meet women friends on Bumble BFF, and kept encountering women with suspiciously similar stories who wanted to sign her up for “mentoring.” As for Monique, she spent at least $75,000 and went deeply into debt over her 8 years with Mary Kay. The last straw was getting sales pressure from her “topline” (person above her in the pyramid) while she was recovering from surgery. She later connected with another ex-Mary Kay contractor, who got her to shell out additional thousands for “financial coaching,” which included a lot of encouraging her to become a “financial coach.” Monique finally took a job in a conventional workplace. While the MLM sales pitch talks about independence and being your own boss, Monique experienced more top-down pressure in Mary Kay than she did in a regular job – or even in the military. Somehow, the moment that really broke my heart was when Monique leveled up at Mary Kay, getting the red jacket and applause she’d coveted. At that point, she’d spent $10,000 to get there, and her walk across the stage only lasted a brief moment. And they charged her for the jacket. ON TO TOP COMMENTS! From Franks Human: I want to nominate this comment by poetry2016 in a post of my own, responding to the (now deactivated) assertion that a young man who killed himself Monday was a “piece of crap.” What poetry2016 does is make the case for how many of us move through life, looking empathetically at people and attempting to understand, as well as offering a realistic, contoured depiction of the mind of a person at the moment of suicide. From Stwriley: In Walter Einenkel’s front page story “Trump’s border czar thinks you probably support ICE violence”, MurielVieux had the absolutely perfect response to the blatant lies of Tom Homan. Both funny and an utterly desirable outcome for the entire administration.