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> producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process. It's hard not to see bitcoin like this, with the huge energy waste and the newly brought in funds from ad-hoc meme advertising on social media going to early investors.
MLMs / Pyramid Schemes and bitcoin are fundamentally different constructs.
When 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…
Fun Fact: the current secretary of education is a multi-billionaire because her family runs Amway.
She married into the Amway stuff through choice rather than growing up in it. Which is in many ways worse.
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This needs to be at a county level. Many blue states are deeply red outside their cities.
Yup. Atlanta is a blue dot in a sea of Georgia red.
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My wife did Mary Kay and they had a clause regarding buy back: They would pay 90% of what you paid to buy it and you'd be blacklisted - you could never by a MK consultant again. So even if an MLM has that type of program they probably make sure people know it'd be bad for them to exercise it.
> they probably make sure people know it'd be bad for them to exercise it. The example you cite seems to undermine this claim. If you're doing terribly selling Mary Kay products, you get 90% of your money back and... you can't sell Mary Kay products anymore. Which you couldn't do in the first place; why would you care about being blacklisted?
This 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
Interesting they go the route of selling inventory. It must be required to make the thing legit. From what I could see from one meeting I was tricked into attending (it was supposed to be a BBQ and no mention of any sort of meeting) the real product to sell was the high margin learning materials and seminars. That the effort of course goes into recruiting people to sell this stuff to. The guy who invited me did well…
I 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 tend run the companies and seed the initial demand. Moms with built in communities are big markets. Wherever you have a big military, police/fire/prison presence you'll see these all over. Also certain church communities, certain freelancer type industries, (yoga contractors, photographers) etc.
- Mormons have huge community networks.
- Mormons are gullible (this will feel offensive to current Mormons, but unfortunately it is true, the entire relgion basically requires you to believe in very crazy stories that are easily proven false if you question them even a tiny bit). And once a leader has been built up to be a "trusted leader" they are taught to follow them without question.
- Mormon women are mostly homemakers (the church largely enforces or "encourages" this), who are looking for ways to support their family or themselves. Work from home schemes that require little work are very attractive to them.
- Mormons have huge families with generally only 1 primary earner. So they often need the extra money. Get rich quick schemes tend to do well within Mormon communities for this reason.
- The Mormon religion is organized nearly identical to an MLM, with layers of free labor. The big worldwide Mormon "rallys" (called "General Conference") is almost identical to a rally for an MLM. If you have been to both, it is hard to tell them apart.
I have been involved in MLMs (through other Mormons in my area) before and the line between MLM and Mormonism is pretty blurry. Mormonism is basically an MLM selling you eternal life (just requires 100% obedience to their laws, and 10% of all pre-tax income you make during your lifetime). So for Mormons who have grown up that way, the MLM atmosphere is very comfortable and familiar. They trust it more than the standard corporate structure. MLMs roll through Mormon communities like wildfire for those reasons.
I have been personally invited to more MLMs as a Mormon than most people reading this even know existed. It is a pillar of Mormon culture.
This 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
This 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
wow. I'm sure I'm going to get downvoted but, you think mlm is bad but the VC model is ok. How many people have spent countless unpaid hours and who knows how much money working on a "start up" VCs: Let's out source the high risk part of finding product/market fit instead of paying for R&D and then come in at the last minute and collect most of the profits.