Subscribe: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher
Have you ever run across someone who said: “My job is perfect, I want more than anything for my kids to follow in my footsteps because they could do no better”? Maybe an MLM person said this to you in an effort to get you to join their company, but … other than that, I’m guessing you’ve never heard anyone say that. Almost every job has serious downsides. Hell, even the “dream” careers like being a rockstar or a movie star are absolutely teeming with people who will tell you just how tough it is and that they hope their kids choose an easier path.
Basically – most jobs suck at least some of the time. But as we watched through LuLaRich and prepared this episode, I was hit with a dawning realization that MLMs have so many of the qualities that can make a job terrible. I kept thinking – UGH, that’s an awful aspect of an MLM, but then I’d immediately think … but that’s not so different from life in a law firm. Or I’d think … boy what a dreadful thing they make these sales people do, but then realize … ummm, isn’t that what it must be like to work as a realtor or a car salesman or even a doctor??
Basically, it’s like whoever created MLMS sat down and said, let me pull from the buffet of insanely awful qualities a job can have and heap alll of them into one giant plate of “Damn I hate my life.”
So today, instead of focusing on the dangers of MLM or the statistics of how many people lose money at it, I want to talk about how MLMs amalgamate everything yucky about work.
Sell, Baby, Sell
Let’s start with the basics: sales. Some people say that there’s no such thing as a job that isn’t sales. No matter what you do, you’re always selling, at the very least, yourself. To which I say … I mean, ok, but some jobs are way more in-your-face about it than others. Jobs that require you to pick up a phone and make cold calls and talk about how awesome you and your product are until somebody finally agrees to sign on the dotted line – those are a heck of a lot more sales-intensive than a job where you just show up and try to make effective progress on a specific task.
So let’s look at a couple examples, starting with a teacher. Yes, you’re selling your kids on the topics you’re teaching. You’re selling yourself to the parents and faculty to try to persuade them you’re effective and intelligent and good at communicating difficult concepts and managing a group of often-unruly children. But has anyone ever asked a school teacher to make a list of everyone they know and then call all those people to see if they’ll buy a product? Unlikely. But if, on the other hand, you’re talking about someone who sells houses or phone service, you’d fully expect them to have done the “list-of-everyone-you’ve-ever-met” routine.
Some jobs are a lot sneakier about this than others. The legal profession has largely become about sales. These days, the richest lawyers are basically lawyers in name only. They are “client developers” or “rain makers.” They look the part, they know the lingo because they did really practice law for many years, and they had success with it. But now, they leave all that grunt work to the others and focus on schmoozing and building relationships. And if you want to make it to that level, you have to be a sales person. You will never make as much money if you just focus on working the cases that other lawyers have brought to the firm and don’t focus on persuading people to hire you. I suspect a lot of other “professional” jobs like this are the same. Accountants and healthcare professionals certainly fall in this category. You can (maybe) just be the person who always does work someone else brings in. But most firms/employers don’t really want people like that above a certain age. You’re supposed to “blossom” into a rain-maker at some point and have people start calling you directly because they know you and they want you. In other words, you’re supposed to be great at sales.
So pushing salesmanship is one thing that is tough about a lot of different jobs, but is your whole job with an MLM.
That’s On You
One of the things that brought LuLaRoe down was the serious decline in quality. This, presumably, was due to sheer greed and the company’s desire to keep more in profits and spend less on the products. And when the sales force complained to the company about it, the leadership response was: “Suck it up, buttercup!” The sales reps were told to just “make it work” and “it works if you work it.” In other words, there is literally nothing that a good salesman can’t overcome. A good salesman can sell ice to an eskimo, so get out there and convince people your crap smells like roses!
Is this awful? Was LuLaRoe corporate shoving the fallout of their greed onto someone else? Yep and yep. But also, again, this is not unique to MLMs. Employees in almost every industry are forced to suffer in difficult working conditions, take home itsy bitsy paychecks, and sell products that aren’t exactly as well-made or as healthy as they could be. And they’re still expected to show up with a smile on their face and “move product” and bear the consequences if they aren’t able to do so.
But with an MLM (certainly LuLaRoe), this whole aspect of “that’s on you,” is taken to a whole new level, because you are your whole company. You’re on your own to sell this product, and honestly, the company doesn’t really care whether you can sell it or not. You’ve already paid to buy inventory from them. Whether you get it into someone else’s hands and make a profit yourself is of far less consequence to them. In fact, in the LuLaRich documentary, the company owners talk about how they don’t even bother keeping track of what profit each individual sales rep makes. That’s “on them.”
Spend Money To Make Money
One of the toxic aspects about MLMs that LuLaRich highlights is that the successful sales reps are strongly encouraged to spend a lot of their money to make the lifestyle look attractive. At LuLaRoe, sales reps were told to spend money on cars, makeup, weight-loss surgery (seriously), clothes, handbags, and just generally living a luxurious lifestyle so that others would want to buy into the LuLaRoe dream.
Pressuring employees to spend their salaries on looking good is pretty awful. It’s basically ensuring that work is a vicious circle: work just so you can have the privilege of continuing to work. But this is not something unique to MLMs, either. So many workers spend a huge portion of their paychecks on being able to continue working. It’s not just the wardrobe. It’s the commuting costs and the cost of paying other people to do things you could probably do yourself if you had more time away from your job. It’s buying a nicer car because you think you need to project success to attract more success.
But MLMs are one of the careers where this terrible aspect of work really gets pushed hard. Because the whole point of MLMs is to convince other people that this is an awesome career that allows you to live a relaxed but luxurious lifestyle. So … if you aren’t driving a BMW and carrying a Prada bag and sporting several hundred dollars of Sephora makeup on your face … how can you do that?
In other words, as we keep saying, MLMs take the bad parts of many jobs and make them way, way worse.
“Girlboss”-Style Feminism
I sure hope that a couple hundred years into the future, people look back at this primitive time and can’t believe just how abominably so many women were treated. But for now, women still have a long way to go when it comes to being seen as more than just pretty faces and baby makers. It certainly seems to be getting better with time. But daaaamn progress is slow. One of the worst things that can happen to any social movement is for people to pay lip service to it, and thereby pretend that the underlying problems have already disappeared. When in reality, those problems thrive under cloak of darkness.
LuLaRoe’s brand of feminism promoted exactly this type of lip-service. On the surface, the company’s founder DeAnne talked about how she wanted to empower women and give them a chance to own their own businesses and be “girlbosses.” But underneath that thin veneer, DeAnne was telling women that they needed to “get down on their knees” to convince their husbands to buy them more inventory. She was telling women that they needed to let their husbands help them with the business and let them handle the heavy-lifting of “hard” things like numbers and inventory management. She was telling women they needed to maintain traditional patriarchal structures in the home. In other words, she wants to set the clock back about 150 years.
The idea of paying lip service to feminism while in reality putting men up for the most important positions in the company and letting women do more of the behind-the-scenes work is not at all unique to MLMs. You’ll find it in every kind of workplace across the country and certainly the globe. But it is something that MLMs take to a new level because they tend to target women primarily. They take advantage of the fact that society holds women down and that many of them feel stuck in their career. And they offer them a way out, that in reality, turns out to be a trap door given just how few people succeed in the MLM-verse. So while you’ll encounter a feminist facade in many workplaces, it is perhaps nowhere as false of a veneer as with MLMs.
Conclusion
We talk about all these issues and more in our podcast. We really enjoyed having this conversation and shedding a little more light on all the worst parts of MLMs. We urge you to steer as far, far away from companies like this. And make sure you check out last week’s post about ten ideas to start your own business (for real) instead of falling prey to an MLM.