No, that’s how the regular stores make their money. Any MLM scheme is an economic entity that cannot thrive at all save by constant expansion (not only of customer-base but, primarily, of sales-force). The biological equivalent is cancer. The only real “product” Amway sells is Amway sales tapes, books, etc.
People like to say shit like that, but in the final analysis, there has to be people out there buying the product…and they do. A buddy of mine in high school worked part-time delivering products for a guy who sold Amway. Kept him busy several hours a night. I met the guy he worked for. He had a nice, “Bewitched” type of house and was supporting a young wife and several kids. Nice guy too. I don’t think this guy was involved in MLM but there’s nothing wrong with MLM in the main. It all depends on the products and the company and how ethical its operation. There have always been some good-quality products sold through MLM and there’s not a thing in the world wrong with it, in and of itself. A lot of people get drawn into it and most fizzle out, but that’s the case in almost any field of endeavor. MLM relies on a high volume of newly recruited sales people knowing that only a few will make a go of it, but the ones who have what it takes do very well. It’s mostly the moaning and groaning coming from former recruits who tried it and failed that has given MLM the difficult reputation it has.
Well, I’ve never met anyone who bought a single thing from Amway who was not also a salesmember. Amway’s product is Amway; the soap is just a marketing tool.
Well, really that’s neither here nor there, some people do actually buy the products AND as SA says, it has the same precariousness of start-up as other businesses. It’s the proselytizing that is a major annoyance.
( I guess the gag is about how it’s kind of a letdown for “Roark” to apply his assumedly superior individualistic intellect and creative drive in something so pedestrian (and group-oriented) as a prepackaged MLM, unless he actually started this MLM. But even in the Randverse there were always supposed to be people in regular sales and service careers, just that they are *the best *at those careers )
The thing about MLM is that is resembles an evangelical religious sect much more closely than it does a conventional business.
The two groups I’ve highlighted above could be the same people, for a while: not all of Bernie Madoff’s clients lost money.
If the MLM outfit offers a product exclusively that can’t be obtained elsewhere (or has exclusive rights to a cheaper source), I could see how the markup inherent in MLM could be overcome and a stable demand could be established. Is this the case with Amway?
Absent that, the only reason I could imagine someone paying $20 for a bottle of vitamins Wal-Mart sells for $10 would be the hope that they will make money eventually. And if that’s the case, the only diffference from a Ponzi scheme is that prospective Amway participants sort of know what they’re getting into.
But this is all kind of moot: to suggest MLM as a large-scale solution to manufacturing and technology sector job losses is no more practical than Tiger Woods suggesting that everybody become a professional golfer. If we as a nation don’t add value, we will over time become poorer.
It’s a common practice for cult like companies to blame indviduals for not “trying hard enough” instead of evaluating the viability of their projects when something fails.
Some MLMs have been in business for decades so clearly for the business model is stainable for some. Then again, only about 50 out of the thousands of MLMs ever formed have managed to stay in business longer than 10 years.
The structure of MLMs prett much guarantees that most people who try it will fail. MLMs rely on an ever expanding pyramid network of reps selling their product. Unfortunately, they will eventually reach a saturation point where no more people in a given area will want to buy that product.
And how much of sales is dependent on reps and distributors buying the product with the intent to resell it?
Do newspaper carriers (formerly “newsboys”) still work under the independent contractor model, whereby they buy the papers from the publisher and are then completely responsible for selling them, signing up subscriptions and collecting fees?
The entry for Amway under The Skeptic’s Dictionary investigates the question of Amway as a cult to some degree.
I think some of the points made about MLM by F.U. Shakespeare and msmith537 are correct. It’s difficult to hack a successful living out of MLM. But I don’t think there’s anything about MLM itself that justifies automatically discrediting people who make a success of it, the way BrainGlutton has been doing with HRoark43. Roark has evidently acheived success in a field where many people find it difficult or impossible to succeed, and so more power to him, I say.
And with regard to the $20 vitamins vs. $10 Walmart vitamins, I see nothing wrong with that either, provided that someone can succeed doing that. There is value in making people aware of something they need or would like to have but which they haven’t for whatever reason availed themselves. If I can convince you that you will live a healthier life by making sure you get all the vitamins you need, I have provided value by persuading you of that, regardless of whether you could get the vitamins cheaper somewhere else. The point is that you weren’t, and that without my help you probably still wouldn’t.
I remember about ten or twelve years or so ago when unclaimed property began to become known and some people were trying to earn money by contacting recipients and making them aware of the money that various states were holding for them. In nearly every case these people had no idea that they had money coming, and most never would have if someone hadn’t taken the trouble to find out about it and then track them down to make them aware of it.
And yet this practice was widely disparaged by the media and the public at large, the criticism being that these people could recover this money on their own for free. Well, yeah…they could have recovered it for free, but the point is they hadn’t. And the reason they hadn’t is because they had no idea of it in the first place. So why is there not value in tracking these people down and making them aware that unclaimed money is being held for them? I never understood the public opinion on this and was puzzled every time I heard or read criticism of it in the news media.
So again, IMO there’s value in making people aware of things they weren’t previously aware of and which is to their benefit. And if an MLM guy can persuade somebody to start taking vitamins when they weren’t taking them before, I think that has value and the MLM guy is perfectly entitled to make a profit from having provided that value. So his cut of that extra ten bucks over Walmart’s price is entirely justified to my way of thinking.
Why I dislike sans-serif fonts #43,282:
I misread “GDP” as “GOP” – which may also be true in a politically opportunistic sense! 
Getting back to the OP: Maybe we can save dying liberalism by re-inventing it as an MLM scheme somehow . . .
Honestly, I’ve argued that for a long time. That the response to corporate sponsorship of the GOP is to return to the streets, to use grass roots organizations, and to make each person responsible for finding at least 4 other people to vote liberal, and who will then go out and find 4 more people.
All we need now are crappy motivational tapes and soap that doesn’t work.
The entire economy and banking system depends on constant expansion. When expansion stops you have a recession. In any case, you seem to have a problem with one particular way someone makes money. There are ways to make money off of MLM just like there are ways to fail - this is the same with any business.
Except there seems to be a MUCH higher percentage of sleezeball scumbags in MLM than other businesses. Except maybe tax accountants.
Well, I suppose since we have concluded that liberalism is in fact still alive and well, let me throw in my 2 cents.
I did some MLM selling water purifiers one summer in the late 80’s. I made $40,000 that summer. I probably sold everyone a know (and a considerable number of people I didn’t know) a water purifier and at least 50 starter kits to friends and family and anyone that came to me seminars. At the end of the summer, I had $40K and a bunch of people had bought between $250 and $5000 worth of water purifiers and as far as I know, there were only a about a dozen people that ever bought more inventory. They started putting me in front of crowded rooms to tell my story and after a while, I couldn’t do it, too many people were getting screwed. Telling everyone that they can be rich when I know that MAYBE 10% will even be able to sell the starting inventory of 6 water filters in a starter kit and that most of them will be giving water filters as gifts for Christmas gifts…
You simply can’t make a lot of money selling water filters for $200 when sears sells basically the same thing for under $100 (the total commission paid out on a single water filter bby the company was actually $100 so unless you were at the very top of the pyramid, you would have made more money just buying the filter from Sears and selling it). Sure I was able to create value by convincing the kids to drink more water (and consequently the parents as well) so you do create value in the sense that Starving Artist describes in post 250 but in the end the only way to really make money is to sell the dream of financial independence and convince people they can make $40K in a summer.
The fact of the matter is that most people are decent hard working folks who don’t have the personality to sell something to someone. You have to be a little brazen, unafraid of embarassment, undeterred by failure and able to create excitement about something as mundane as water filters and yes, you have to be able to ignore the fact that anyone that buys more than one of these things from you is only doing so because you have gotten them really excited and painted a rosy picture of what life will be like when they are at the top of the pyramid just collecting checks while knowing that 99%+ are wrong.
Its ridiculous to even imply that even a large minority of people can do anything like this. That doesn’t make them fungible labor units or useless, my doctor could never have done it, most partners at law firms couldn’t do it, but most of the people that are good at this couldn’t be doctors or lawyers either. In the end, you make money selling empty promises to all but a small group of people who can sell ice to eskimos…
Which is why it terrifies me that telemarketing is virtually the last entry-level office job left in the US.*
Ok, so maybe that’s hyperbole, but that’s what it’s felt like looking for work the last few years.