The Enquirer provides a service for it’s cost. Yes, it’s trash, it’s obviously made-up nonsense, but just the same, it’s entertainment and titillation. The tabloids do the same thing MAD and Cracked magazines do, they’re just a little less obvious about it.
Look at “professional” wrestling… Everyone watching- with a few exceptions- knows it’s choreographed better than a ballet and scripted down to the eye-gouge, but it gets better Nielsens than The West Wing.
Worthless garbage, all, yes, but entertaining, and more importantly, legal.
With a pyramid scheme, there is no product, no sales, no service, no nothing. It’s purely a method to steal a lot of very small amounts of money, with a minimum of effort.
When one gets that $5, that means five people lost a dollar. They got nothing in return for that dollar, with the possible exception of becoming just a little wiser.
As for that “not a pyramid scheme” thing you mention, I’d lay a day’s wages that it was, indeed, a slightly-reworked pyramid scheme. Find the guy who offered it to you and see if you can’t get some details. I’ll bet when you boil off the doubletalk and $5-phrase gobbledegook, it’ll be a pyramid scheme. There’s lots of variants, up to and including the “Make Money Fast” type, where one pays their $5 (or $10 or $25) for a booklet on making fast, easy money, and when said booklet arrives, it’s a sheaf of photocopied instructions that tell you to photocopy the instructions and thenn turn around and sell the copies to others as instructions on how to make easy money.
In all pyramid schemes, you very rapidly run out of “customers”. If you keep it local, you’ll run out of suckers in a heartbeat.
You also have to remember that it’s totally illegal. Yes, the perpetrators are counting on the fact that the average Joe doesn’t “run the numbers” as you say. And yes, sheer greed may indeed drag some in looking to get in while there’s still money to be made, but the majority usually realize that, no matter how it’s repackaged or rewritten, it’s still a pyramid scheme and it’s still illegal.
And that’s not just “running a red light” illegal, it’s Mail Fraud Illegal. Federal Trade Commission illegal. Postal Lottery Laws illegal. Scheming To Defraud illegal. It’s illegal thruought all fifty states, all of Canada, all of Europe and the UK, all of Australia, you name it.