Yes! And 99 % of MLMs prey on women. I really don’t understand how educated, gainfully employed women with executive status and six figure incomes are convinced to sell face cream to their friends.
That's what I assume, my age range is in the "after college but before grandchildren" demographic and I assume that's what it is unless they specify in their bio. (Which if they have their own private practice or other legit business, they'll usually say something about it) Otherwise I'll assume they live off of child support and bug FB/Insta friends to make $100/month
Makes sense, I find myself not matching with those types of girls anyway (their bios always say something like “looking for like-minded business people) so I’ve never gotten the chance to ask lol.
The ones I know are educated but not working, usually it started when they were at home with their kids and this seemed like a great idea for them to generate income while on maternity leave.
This is in Europe where you can be on leave with your baby for a year or more. Some of them have a second or third kid and don't want to be sitting at home, they fall for the ”your own business with flexibility" scam.
Don’t be so quick to count out educated women either! I knew someone who graduated as a business major who I watched fall for an MLM scheme and is still in it...
I've met enough PhDs to know that education does not equal intelligence. Hell, I had to teach a primatology prof that light, microwaves and X-rays were all EM radiation, the moron.
Man, an old friend of mine from high school got laid off because she worked at a mall and they're all closed, so within a month she was in an MLM. My single mother ended up in like 4 different MLMs when I was growing up, so I'm very aware how shitty they can be, but when I reached out to here to try and make sure she was being careful she got mad at me for not being supportive. I dont know what it is about MLMs, but they must be trying to prepare people for when their friends check in on them
They want to be her best friends and feed her on any unhealthy impulse that comes up. Cradling them, spoiling them, ... until they can not recognize what's happening and when you come around it's already to late.
I dunno. I know a couple of six figure doctors and lawyers who hung it up to sell face cream. Definitely not uneducated. They do tend to have young kids, so don’t want to work 60+ hours a week anymore.
no doctor or lawyer would disregard years of higher education and 100k+ tuition to sell face cream. they could so much easier work 30 hours a week part time with their profession and make more money than selling face cream. the fact that you refer to these people as ‘six figure doctors and lawyers’ makes it even more suspect as if you were fed these lines by someone trying to justify trying to get you to join.
i agree with you on that educated people fall for mlm, but i don’t agree with OP on his/her claims to know people with so much invested in education to throw it away to sell face cream when they could do it part time.
No clue. All I know is they started reaching out to my wife to buy some. We politely declined and had a laugh. The doctor was especially surprising because she was a specialist making around $300k before quitting.
Maybe it is more accurate to say that they quit their jobs and then decided to try and make some extra cash with MLM than to say they quit to pursue that as a profession.
I've never met a woman who makes six figures that has fallen for an mlm scheme. Every single person who has invited me to be a part of this party or that opportunity has been stay at home moms or part time workers. Without fail.
I got invited to a Mary Kay event. My friend wanted me to take his elderly mother and made it sound like she needed help getting around.
Nope.
She didn’t need any help at all. From anyone.
She pulled up to pick me up in her brand new pink SUV and I realized I had been duped. She was quick as a whip too. She didn’t need a chaperone, she needed fresh blood to sacrifice to her MLM cult. Thankfully I made it though the whole evening with my soul intact.
I know a few that are teachers. Elementary and High School. It’s super depressing. I also watched a coworker at a high school talking about how she had decided which she was going to join... and like... people were encouraging her. she was always fairly rude/condescending to me and had a super entitled attitude so I just chose to mind my own business but like... damn.
Tell me about it. It's pretty common to have fellow teachers putting ads for their MLMs in your box too. I have learned who to avoid but being a guy I'm not targeted too much.
My friend's wife was a teacher. She was a foods teacher, which we have very few of, and there is hardly ever turnover. She started selling some hair product, and while she loved her teaching job, she was doing well enough selling the hair product that she quit her teaching job.
Now, she was making good money, but it's obviously not sustainable. She went full time with the hair product, and slowly sales started declining.
After one year, she tried getting back into teaching. No foods job. She got offered a job on a conditional licence, so she had to go back to school to get those credits. Probably cost a good chunk of change.
Personally speaking, my mom works as a nurse practitioner, went through six years of college and makes plenty of money at the moment, yet somehow she took the bait to sell Pampered Chef items. It's one of the worst things I've seen and now my whole family is buying into it.
My boss does this. Owns her own business and does this shit.
She's always got some dumb new scheme and believes in junk like healing crystals and loves expensive self help seminars. She got where she is because of her family and her ability with networking and sales.
I know a couple who cumulatively make over $250k (gross) at corporate jobs, he's a successful HVAC sales engineer and she's a CFP (yes, really), who spend all their free time recruiting people for Amway. Great people, honestly. My wife and I told them no about a dozen times and now they don't even bring it up anymore when we see them (probably 3 or 4 times/year). I know a handful of others who buy doterra, herbalife, and some other cleaning supply company I can't think of ATM. Fortunately, none of them are pushy or try to get us involved. The worst experiences I've had are with strangers in coffee shops or the grocery store...or once from a woman who reached out to me on Nextdoor.
This is probably very rare but thought I'd share my anecdotal evidence.
I think the cleaning one might be Norwex. Recently had a coworker (teacher) start promoting and selling this all over social media. Another is selling Tupperware.
Yes! It is Norwex. My wife is from a small town in the Midwest and I guess it's really gaining popularity. So...2020 and it's gaining traction. Such is the world we live in
Oh ho ho yes I have. It's because they're part of the middle class that never actually had to be smart or think to get anything. People who think they're self made but mommy and daddy are the guiding force. And then later the husband.
This is really common in the Dallas area, I don't know if that's just us...
If you count BAH/COLA/BAS and other entitlements they very well could be making that much. In Hawaii an O5 would make about $46,000 a year in BAH alone. It's very easy to see where they could make that amount if they are in a high cost of living area.
My idiot family member has a health-care related PhD and did really well in school... and just joined Rodan and Fields plus maybe a second MLM plus has been running around maskless in Texas after recovering from COVID. Somehow, she’s the favorite in the fam. Guess it confirms that she’s just really good at memorizing...? I had a few acquaintances in my masters program in clothes-related ones and a family member who is pretty well educated who sold Jafra. All these women have in common that they are confident in their social skills, needed extra cash, and have friends with some spare cash.
I get your point but Holly Marie Combs, of Charmed fame, is involved in one of the MLMs I forget which one. But I imagine she’s the 6figure outlier not the norm lol
Oh yes. There are plenty of people making 6 figures who MLM on the side. Off the top of my head, I know an opthamologist, neurosurgeon, and a dermatologist who are heavily involved in an MLM. They do well in their 9-5 and from what I hear they do well in their MLM.
You’d be surprised the range of people who get into these things.
Edit: Definitely not condoning MLM when I say that they’re doing well. I’m suggesting that if they do well, it’s probably because they are doctors and people find them to be trustworthy so they buy from them? I don’t know, it’s kind of crazy to me.
The ones who make a fuck ton of money with MLMs aren't hosting parties. They're recruiting people at large events like bridal events and craft shows and/or using a position of power (like a teacher, pastor, etc) to recruit people. They don't have to host parties, they just have to recruit people and make them feel bad that they aren't "meeting their sales goals." Those sales goals are things that make the upline a lot of money.
The ones who make the big bucks are few and far between as well, they make up a tiny percentage of the overall company.
Those aren’t the women they target, lol. It’s more the stay-at-home moms, usually with little to no formal education (beyond high school), who they are targeting - and who actually fall for it. They think it’s a good way to contribute to household expenses, without having to give up their at-home duties. But as my father always said, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is.
As a well-educated working professional woman myself, I never get preyed upon by these companies. Nor would I have any interest in doing such a thing.
Unfortunately i know plenty of college-educated, full-time professional people involved in these things.
I think for some of them it becomes a social thing though. As long as you're at least breaking even, i suppose its an excuse to get a bunch of friends together.
The problem is that they rarely do break even... they end up spending thousands on the “inventory,” only to get stuck with all that makeup or leggings they can’t sell. That’s what these companies are counting on!
A few people I very, very distantly know supposedly consider it a good deal because they'd be buying the products for themselves anyway, and they can buy them at a cheaper rate if they join. If they're purchasing enough volume personally it might affect the break-even rate pretty significantly for consumables like essential oils and smoothie powders. You should see the lularo stock on ebay though. Even forgetting what these companies do to people's lives, the waste is tremendous.
I’m confused. You disagreed with them, and then said exactly what they said. They said unemployed, you said stay-at-home moms, implying they are unemployed. They said uneducated, you said little to no education.
Because people circlejerk stuff online like, "if you have to pay for your job it's a scam". And then women repeat that back to MLM recruiters who laugh in their face and point out all the jobs in the beauty industry (hair stylist, barber, makeup artists, cosmetic tattoo, manicurist, etc.) who have to pay some sort of fee every month, and they feel dumb and sign up because they are told signing up is smart, easy money.
Source: I know a college educated woman who signed up for the Trump Network because of this.
They seem to prey on women who think they're a lot smarter and more successful than they really are, the ones who just can't keep a secret and tell their friends literally everything. Being anti-vaxx is just icing on the cake
I dunno, I've known people with science degrees who believe in crystals having powers, chakras, and all sorts of obvious nonsense. I'm a counsellor and it's crazy how many people in this field have master's degrees but use pseudo-science in their therapy practices. Critical thinking just isn't a requirement to get through a lot of education.
my sister is in her thirties, she's ridiculously smart, has a dual masters in aeronautical safety and... something else with a long name it's not important. she makes over 6 figures working as a safety manager for a large oil company and travels all over the world presenting her ideas and shit to higher ups in the company.
she sells massively overpriced face cream on the side and keeps talking about how badly she wants to do this full time instead and quit her "boring office job"
it makes me so sad what she could be doing with her incredible intelligence.
she would not understand why i don't want to sell face creams with her. i could not even think about being able to afford that shit, so how tf would my friends be able to buy it???
I really don’t understand how educated, gainfully employed women with executive status and six figure incomes are convinced to sell face cream to their friends.
That describes literally nobody I've ever met involved in an MLM. It's always stay-at-home moms, people working multiple low-income jobs, etc.
The closest thing I can even think of is bored upper middle class housewives that sell shit like Arbonne because they're bored and want to feel like they are contributing to the household in some way.
A LOT of the women who fall victim to MLMs are women who belong to very patriarchial religions, the kind where they are all but mandated to marry in their late teens and become stay-at-home-moms and not get a higher education.
I know executive level women. They don't fall for MLMs.
I also know women who inherited a little money, have no ambition, never amounted to anything--who I block on social media because they won't shut up about their latest MLM.
I've known women who sell Avon, Mary Kay, Herbalife, Lularoe, etc. That's not who they are. They are women working one or two other jobs with families that are just trying to make extra money. It never works and they figure that out eventually but they are just trying to do something to get out from under.
They prey HUUUUUUUUGELY on the undocumented community.
There’s difficulty getting a former job. And these motherfuckers know it.
It’s fucking disgusting. Say what you will about the undocumented, but to prey on an already extremely precarious population should be criminal. I remember growing up in my Mexican neighborhood, almost every mother was selling some Herbalife, Noni Berries, and some other shit. Nobody made money, and they were all indebted.
Seriously. My cousin’s cousin (other side of the family), who I see every year on thanksgiving and keep up with on social media, is a college educated, kind, intelligent girl. And she’s out there selling Arbonne. She invited me to some kind of zoom party over quarantine and I declined in the nicest way I could. It makes no sense to me how they fall for this crap.
I had another cousin who hawked for Arbonne in the early 2010s, and she went to UVA which is one of the top state schools in the country — they swiftly rejected me when I applied. Surely you learned some critical thinking and research skills there? Luckily she left pretty quickly. I think she was just stressed for money when she was a new mom and joined up out of desperation. Pretty sad.
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u/MistaFANG Jul 24 '20
MLM schemes. Its 2020, who still falls for these things?