A fellow engineer I work with has been in financial distress over the last few years. Primarily due to overspending (big homes, fancy vacations, etc.). I get the feeling he’s in a lot of debt. Last year he took a part-time job at Kroger. This is in addition to his regular job.
So a couple months ago his wife got involved in an MLM company called Nerium. Their main product is a skin cream made from a poisonous plant. :dubious: Apparently she already has a big enough “down line” that the company has given her a “free” Lexus. (At least that’s what my coworker says. A quick google search shows that the Lexus is not really free.)
Anyway, my coworker is now going through our entire complex (a big place) trying to get people to sign up to be under his wife’s MLM. He is mainly targeting the female employees.
It’s annoying. And I don’t see this ending well. I predict that, sooner or later, his wife will be unable to qualify for the $500 bonus she receives each month from Nerium for her “free” Lexus. And then my coworker will be stuck with the lease payments, and thus will be in an even worse situation.
I obviously don’t know much about your work environment but would be talking to your supervisor or HR and expressing your concerns be an option - I would hope either would keep it on the QT until they decide what to do (if anything). I can’t help but see (from a management perspective) that this will not end well in terms of their employees’ ability to work and play together.
If I were this guy’s manager I would not be happy. He’s spending his time annoying his co-workers instead of doing his job. It’s bad for morale and productivity.
I wouldn’t make it my job to shut this guy down throughout the company. Make it clear that YOU don’t want to hear any sales pitches, YOU aren’t interested, etc. Complain to your boss if he brings up the crap with you again.
Well, if the OP is friendly to the guy, the OP might want to warn him that management is not going to appreciate the guy wasting company time (both his time and the time of those whom he is selling to) doing this. It would help if the OP can point to a written prohibition on outside solicitation but even that should not be necessary.
Same here. An old friend from high school sold Nerium.
I went back to my high school reunion… a many years reunion, with lots of us old wrinkly people in attendance. She brought her sales kit and worked the room.
She then continued at the after-party at the local bar. I was taken in. I was weak and possibly drunk.
The stuff was about $90 a month with “automatic shipping” which sent a new bottle to your doorstep every month, billed to your credit card.
My face broke out in blisters on the stuff, so I never got to look younger, with smoother, more supple skin.
Getting that damned automatic shipping thing turned off was a gigantic pain in the ass. My high school friend was no help at all, of course. I finally got the shipments stopped, but I had to cut all contact and unfriend her on facebook in order to stop the relentless sales pitches.
I had a coworker who (briefly) attempted to do some MLM stuff around the office. I don’t remember the name, but it was some overpriced acai berry nonsense when that stuff was all the rage.
He was polite and not pushy (and not really much of a salesman). I told him that sales was hard work, and if he thought he had aptitude for it, he should think about doing sales for our actual company, since the commissions are orders of magnitude better, and he actually knows a lot about the product. I also told him that my stepmom does Mary Kay sales and personal MLM retail sales is hard work. Not sure if my advice penetrated or if he came to his own realization pretty quickly that this wasn’t going to be the easy money that whoever had roped him into it claimed, but he never mentioned it to me again.
And somehow we’re not all spending hundreds of dollars a month on magic berry juice, so who knows if that company is still around.
Thankfully neither I nor anyone I know outside the Dope has had to put up with ork-prone bovines pushing MLM at our jobs. I’ve had coworkers that did MLM but thankfully didn’t hit me up. One of my mom’s friends on the other hand was pretty pushy with her cosmetic/skin care MLM (a couple decades ago so I don’t remember the name). My mom actually liked the product enough to buy the stuff from her friend, but her friend was only interested in establishing a downstream and my mom steadfastly refused. It may have severed the friendship.
I really wish the product itself hadn’t been mentioned. What usually happens now is that a bunch of new posters who “most certainly do not work for that company, guaranteed!” will “just happen” to spot this thread and testify as to it’s wholesomeness and wonderfulness, and disabuse us of the craaaaazy notion that an MLM is in any way involved.
“M(o)navie” (parenthesis added to keep the crazies away, per Czarcasm’s direction).
I had a neighbour who was involved in that scam. Sat down and listened to the sales pitch when I was an impressionable university student. I bought a bottle but passed on joining the pyramid scheme.
Their presentation showed the organizational layout as “triangle shaped” about 5 minutes after the part about how they “weren’t a pyramid scheme.” The cognitive dissonance was stunning.
I’m used to an alphabet soup of all sorts of acronyms. With my new job, I get to learn a whole new bowl; nay, it’s a giant vat of consonant broth spiced with vowels.
Multi-Level Marketing.
You get people working under you selling the product, you get a cut. They have to get people under them selling so they get a cut of which you get a cut.
Think of a pyramid. The only people making money are near the top. The local territory quickly gets saturated so late comers really have no one to sell to.