Anyone ever been involved with MLM or Network Marketing?

[Scepcop]

I looked into it a couple of times, but rather than losing any money, I wrote up this article debunking it:

http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Multi- ... keting.htm

[Scepcop]

Here's a Dateline NBC undercover investigation revealing Quixtar (Amway repackaged) as a scam. The cult-like atmosphere they show during the Quixtar rallies is really freaky, like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Part 1:


Part 2:

[Eternally Learning]

Yeah, I was in Amway right about the time Quixtar was released. Even went to a few of those seminars. Pretty lame all around. Even when I bought into the concept, I got really fed up with the speakers who talked about nothing more than how rich they were. What made me realize it was hopeless was two things.

1. The guy directly upstream from me had been at this for close to a decade and was very hard-working. Most of his wealth did not come from Amway, and his Amway business was pretty good.

2. Every story of someone who had made it big, was from someone who'd been in on it at the beginning of something. No one on those stages had worked their way up there in an existing market.

Well, lesson learned at any rate.

[Arouet]

Something tells me this spamster hasn't read the thread...

[NinjaPuppy]

[NinjaPuppy]

Sorry, I know nothing about network marketing.

[Craig Browning]

I have an old chum that's a 3rd generation member of the Church of Amway who has tried to get me sucked into it time and again; even my PCA's family is stuck into the stuff which isn't anything close to what it used to be, more like a bulk warehouse store on line rather than a company with its own line of decent products.

I know many who pull in great money through this type of deal but I know even more who've alienated everyone they knew (including family) and lost a boat load as well. Pyramid simply isn't "right"

[Arouet]

Kinda funny that this spammer would go into a thread trashing MLM in order to spam MLM

[NinjaPuppy]

Yes it is funny. That's why I left the post but removed the link.

[craig weiler]

Dear John the Computer Generated Comment,
What you will find instead is a business model aimed at getting n00bs to sell to their families and friends while getting very little money for the effort. Since the companies provide no leads and do no advertising, it is up to the n00b to somehow expand their sales network with no experience and no real support. The profit structure is designed with the n00b failure in mind. They are all cynically set up to keep most of the profit from these sales.

[Scepcop]

I just deleted the spam posts above and removed the poster's profile as well, to help clean up the board.

[Scepcop]

Check out these quotes from a USA Today article on MLM's:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/in ... 3_CV_N.htm

"It can be very difficult, if not impossible, for most individuals to make a lot of money through the direct sale of products to consumers. And big money is what recruiters often allude to in their pitches."
"You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone making over $1.50 an hour. The primary product is opportunity. The strongest, most powerful motivational force today is false hope."

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/co ... _ST3_N.htm

"Robert FitzPatrick, who runs PyramidSchemeAlert.org and works as an expert witness in lawsuits against multilevel marketing companies, says state and federal government officials simply can't or choose not to police multilevel marketing companies as much as he believes is necessary. FitzPatrick says "virtually all" consumer salespeople who work in multilevel marketing lose because the recruitment-based marketing can only bring in so much money. Each level always has to be bigger than the last level, and the "vast majority always have to be at the bottom.""

Wikipedia's stats on MLM's also show overwhelmingly that most people end up losing money in them, not making money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-leve ... ome_levels

"Several sources have commented on the income level of specific MLMs or MLMs in general:

* The Times: "The Government investigation claims to have revealed that just 10% of Amway's agents in Britain make any profit, with less than one in ten selling a single item of the group's products."[24]
* Scheibeler, a high level "Emerald" Amway member: "UK Justice Norris found in 2008 that out of an IBO [Independent Business Owners] population of 33,000, 'only about 90 made sufficient incomes to cover the costs of actively building their business.' That's a 99.7 percent loss rate for investors."[25]
* Newsweek: based on Mona Vie's own 2007 income disclosure statement "fewer than 1 percent qualified for commissions and of those, only 10 percent made more than $100 a week."[26]
* Business Students Focus on Ethics: "In the USA, the average annual income from MLM for 90% MLM members is no more than US $5,000, which is far from being a sufficient means of making a living (San Lian Life Weekly 1998)"[27]

USA Today has had several articles:

* "While earning potential varies by company and sales ability, DSA says the median annual income for those in direct sales is $2,400."[28]
* In an October 15, 2010 article, it was stated that documents of a MLM called Fortune reveal that 30 percent of its representatives make no money and that 54 percent of the remaining 70 percent only make $93 a month. The article also states Fortune is under investigation by the Attorneys General of Texas, Kentucky, North Dakota, and North Carolina with Missouri, South Carolina, Illinois, and Florida following up complaints against the company.[29]
* A February 10, 2011 article stated "It can be very difficult, if not impossible, for most individuals to make a lot of money through the direct sale of products to consumers. And big money is what recruiters often allude to in their pitches." [30]
* "Roland Whitsell, a former business professor who spent 40 years researching and teaching the pitfalls of multilevel marketing": "You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone making over $1.50 an hour, (t)he primary product is opportunity. The strongest, most powerful motivational force today is false hope."[30]"

[SydneyPSIder]

yeah, all of the above. I studied this a while ago out of curiosity about the business model, as everyone gets approached about this stuff once or twice. most people make about $60 a month in amway apparently, and that's when they're trying. hardly the grounds to ditch your job or get rich that they're always talking about. they're selling a dream. the products are overpriced, so it's not even competitive with traditional wholesale/retail outlets even with store rental overheads, power, staff wages, etc, so you have to question that, because that's one of their lines, that this will replace traditional wholesale/retail any day now because it's such a goer -- their internal markups etc can be 100%, because they siphon so much up the upline. how is it competitive in a capitalist milieu to be so much dearer than the competition for the same products? -- so then they start stressing how their particular products are 'unique' etc -- they are often of reasonably good quality to fool the downliners, but they are not unique or unobtainable anywhere else. so they sell you on that line, and they encourage you to buy no other products but theirs, to discourage you from shopping around and comparing prices like anyone rational actor would do, so you don't wake up from the dream. with all their internal markups -- 100% from manufacturer to their wholesale price, then 100% more up the upline, they price themselves out of the market -- because it's not a sensible capitalist business model, they have to sell the idea via the dream.

Then there's the problems that there is no defined sales territory, so your next door neighbour could be trying to sell to you and vice versa, so you have no protections over territory. And think about it, if you answered a job for a travelling salesman, you would expect or like a base salary, commission, a mobile phone and a vehicle -- you're never going to get any of that from a MLM outfit. Why would you take second best if you've decided you're going to have a career in sales? you're spendign your evenings delivering piles of garbage products to people with your own vehicle with no reimbursement for the fuel or time.

Then there was the 'Tools' scandal in the US where the upline organisers were scamming members at the motivational conferences -- they were making a fortune selling crappy motivational tapes etc, where the profits from the tools were far greater than any profit being made from the goods for sale -- i.e. they were preying on the hopes of their own deluded downline.

[NinjaPuppy]

[Scepcop]

Check out my new blog article debunking MLM's like Market America with logic, facts and common sense.

http://intellectualexpat.blogspot.com/2 ... ading.html