I'm a little concerned that at no point in the article does the author use the term "pyramid scheme."
The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
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Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#32This article doesn’t dig into the details, but these companies are really vicious. They aggressively recruit at my college and I’ve seen them to convince students to take what they would have spent on next semesters tuition and use it to buy “inventory” (i.e. more products than they’ll ever be able to resell) instead. These things ruin people’s lives
How do you craft a law to make this illegal though? And then how do you enforce the law? How do you bring these companies to justice? A fool and his money are easily parted. If those students didn't blow their tuition on MLM garbage, they'd have blown it on something else. I'm sure there's a kid somewhere who blew his tuition making ridiculous option trades based on something he read on r/wallstreetbets.
Simple, if you receive income that is a royalty from the sale of products you sold to the person who ultimately sold them, it's taxed at 100%.
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#33I wonder why MLM's are so rampant in the mountain west. I know "mormons" and "sales experience from missionary work" but the analysis can go deeper. From personal, anecdotal experience, a lot of these MLM people I've seen are moms. Could it be that that area is so sales heavy that stay-at-home moms want to run their own thing so they get into MLM on the side?
Having been raised Mormon, it ain't surprising in the slightest that so many of these are concentrated in and around Utah/Idaho.
There are a multitude of factors at play here:
- Like you mentioned, door-to-door proselytism translates well to door-to-door sales.
- Mormon communities tend to be very tight-knit and immediately trusting of fellow Mormons, so once you have a critical mass of LDS followers selling your "inverted funnel", it's gonna spread like wildfire.
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints actively discourages any sort of rational individual thought, instead encouraging its members to "doubt your doubts" and follow the Church without question. This ends up serving MLM marketers well. The Church is America's longest-running and most-successful MLM scheme; to your average Mormon, this is all very "normal".
- The Church does its best to railroad women into being faithful wives to their husbands and mothers to their children, which (as you touched on) translates to emphasizing stay-at-home parenting over holding a full-time job. This keeps Mormon women busy for a few years, but once those kids are in school (and even moreso when those kids grow up and move out), there ain't a whole lot to do at home. Mormon women - being human beings with free wills, contrary to what the Church would want us to believe - are thus inclined to take up part-time jobs, especially ones that they can do without compromising the Mormon ideal of women-as-domestic-servants-to-their-husbands. MLM schemes tick all the boxes, or at least so their marketing claims.
- Middle America already has a strong predisposition toward distrusting modern medicine/science, so appeals to "traditional" medicine tend to be somewhat more effective.
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#34Over the past 15 years, I've had the opportunity to work with more than a dozen MLM companies in the UK. This won't be a popular opinion, however I believe great quality products and a self-regulating industry can create businesses that are far from being a Ponzi scheme but are legitimate companies with ethics, great support and opportunity to earn decent money.
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#35This article doesn’t dig into the details, but these companies are really vicious. They aggressively recruit at my college and I’ve seen them to convince students to take what they would have spent on next semesters tuition and use it to buy “inventory” (i.e. more products than they’ll ever be able to resell) instead. These things ruin people’s lives
[deleted]
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#36I'm a little concerned that at no point in the article does the author use the term "pyramid scheme."
Like it's co-opting this soft language that the industry is pushing to distance itself from a pyramid scheme, which is very much is?
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#37I found « The Dream » podcast to be pretty good on the topic. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream
Agreed. I’m not usually a huge podcast person, but this was a really interesting look at the history through today of MLMs
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#38I wonder why MLM's are so rampant in the mountain west. I know "mormons" and "sales experience from missionary work" but the analysis can go deeper. From personal, anecdotal experience, a lot of these MLM people I've seen are moms. Could it be that that area is so sales heavy that stay-at-home moms want to run their own thing so they get into MLM on the side?
Mormons Losing Money. (Also seen: Mom's Losing Money.)
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#39I wonder why MLM's are so rampant in the mountain west. I know "mormons" and "sales experience from missionary work" but the analysis can go deeper. From personal, anecdotal experience, a lot of these MLM people I've seen are moms. Could it be that that area is so sales heavy that stay-at-home moms want to run their own thing so they get into MLM on the side?
Having been raised Mormon, it ain't surprising in the slightest that so many of these are concentrated in and around Utah/Idaho. There are a multitude of factors at play here: - Like you mentioned, door-to-door proselytism translates well to door-to-door sales. - Mormon communities tend to be very tight-knit and immediately trusting of fellow Mormons, so once you have a critical mass of LDS followers selling your "in…
Your first and second points are strong hypotheses. In my opinion the third in particular needs substantiation. It's quite common for external religiosity to be negatively correlated with higher education (a reasonable proxy for "rational individual thought," which is otherwise difficult to measure). Neutral evidence points towards the opposite for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - unique in having a strong positive correlation wherein the more highly educated, the more religiously active a member is, at least in the United States [1]. Members are also more likely to have a college education than non-members (61% vs. 50%) in the U.S. as a whole, again not supporting an aversion to rational thought [2]. Neither of those disproves your assertion, but they do provide evidence to the contrary.
[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/26/in-america-does-more-edu... [2] https://www.pewforum.org/2009/07/24/a-portrait-of-mormons-in...
Re: The MLM Epidemic in 13 Maps
#40When I worked retail sales in the 90s there was an Amway cult meeting nearby. Every few weeks, they would drop in after a pep-rally type thing and try to waste your time looking at the most expensive thing and talk about their amazing business. Then they'd drop the pitch (at the time it was about their e-commerce business). Once you ran into them, you could spot them. It was a mix of desperate mid-life crisis guys lo…
> It was a mix of desperate mid-life crisis guys looking for cash, clean-cut naive younger people, and diligent moms starting a business. Something struck me as a bit familiar about those descriptions. And then I remembered, around here, it matches up with the demographics of the gig economy types. Uber, food delivery, etc. Only difference being the gig economy types are drawn more from the poor. I wonder if the desp…
> the desperate who are middle or upper middle class
I find they tend to do both. The poor won't have the capital nor credit to be an Uber driver. The middle class will engage in both. I've had my share of Uber/Lyft drivers also hawking Herbalife.