Amway and other multi-level marketing cults

bah my bestie invited me for a 'business opportunity' tonight and I knew damn well it was going to be one of these. He's a great dude tho so I went to the info session just to be nice.

The guy presenting was supposedly a baller who is making $250k a year yet he dropped "uh" every three seconds, his powerpoint was amateurish Comic Sans nonsense, and used some really chintzy clipart that often had no relation to the content on the slide. Plus he got sidetracked easily. and yet people were wowed by his 'speech'.

fortunately my friend is a good dude and didn't get too upset when I said this wasn't for me but yow, cult-mentality for sure. what made me LOL is that the company's fucking logo WAS IN THE SHAPE OF A GODDAMN PYRAMID!!!

I know a woman in Hungary who was a former client running a really successful chain of businesses across the country who sold up and invested in MLM. She was getting a pretty raw deal from the international franchise organisation she was originally working with, but would have been making pretty good money in her original ventures. She's now hawking 0rg@n0 G0ld and various "health supplements". It's so depressing.

Got Amwayed by a work buddy a few months back. Asked me out to lunch like nbd then his wife joins and I knew something was up. All buttery and lame small talk, acting overly interested. Cheap perfume, extensions. Small talk turns into what I like to do in spare time, if I'd wished I had more money (WHO DOESNT). Then in comes old white haired dude who happened to be in town leading a conference about this stuff. Supposedly some super high up in the company idk idc. So dude hands me an old laptop and some cheap ass skullcandys and asks me to watch this dvd, it'll only take a few minutes. So i turn on the dvd, comic sans, crap vector art, MONEY, EVERYONE WANTS MONEY. Own YOUR BUSINESS, ITS YOOOOOOUR BUSINESS. anyway i zone out after 15 seconds and plan my words. not interested, no thanks, what you don't want more money? nope Im good. but earlier you said you did, well now i don't thanks my parents did amway and it ruined a lot of their friendships and zapped them of time with us I've seen it first hand and friendships and free time are more important than an extra grand a month. The rest of the lunch was spent either deflecting or in awkward silence. they didn't pick up my tab. haven't talked to dude since.

it's always a good sign that a program is on the up and up when your friends have to trick you into telling you about it.

and they're all like showing the range of salary you could make with a little elbow grease and I'm like "yeah I make $20k more than that currently in a job I like and making that much w/ Amway would force me to be a horrible human being peddling crap I don't believe in to friends and colleagues so yeah no thanks"

this always makes me think of william fitchner and jane krakowski in "go"

haha that scene was in my head all night but I couldn't remember what movie that was from!

even worse than Amway was Pr!merica back in 2002-2003-ish. They were a subsidiary of C!tigroup that peddled really terrible insurance to gullible folks.

the person that invited me to this was my bestie at the time (no longer, for reasons like these, and the fact that he spent 3-4 months hitting on my girlfriend in front of me in 2009). He was like "Man, I got you a job interview, I know you hate your current job, so come check this out". Gave me only a brief description, that it involved insurance, told me it'd only take a little time...and I was making less than 10k a year waiting tables and going to school, so y'know...I said what the hell, an interview is only an hour, and maybe it's a good company.

Within 5 minutes I knew the 'interview' was a sham (they asked me really idiotic questions like "is it better to have less money or more money" and overcongratulated me when I got one 'right', telling me "not everybody gets that question right, wow!"). Of course, at the end, they tell me I passed muster (congrats, you're hired!), so I'm expecting to get to the 'ok here's what we pay' line when they start to tell me about having people under you and having to sell this and that and at this point I was kinda naive and had only cursory knowledge of pyramids but it reminded me of the phone-card scam my parents fell for in the 90s. So I'm eyerolling, but like 'ok fine, I'll just soldier through, what's it gonna hurt'. Zoning out and not listening to the guy the entire time until I hear the words "so in order to participate we'll need $200 from you, will that be cash or check?"

Bestie of course 'conveniently' forgot to tell me about this in advance, knowing full well that at the time, $200 was like, everything I had in the bank. I said I might need some time, and they were all like "OH WELL GEORGE HERE HAS TO TAKE THE CHECKS IN A TRUCK TO ATLANTA TOMORROW" (ok?). In an obviously rehearsed moment (one lots of people parrot in the industry), my friend offers to front me the money "if I get 5 people below me". Nowadays, I woulda said "fuck this" (hell, nowadays, I wouldn't have even shown up to begin with), but then, being naive, and letting people take advantage of me, I said 'ok', thinking hey, maybe I can get some money.

I get home and read the nasty reviews on Primerica and immediately regret it. I went to one of the meetings, and like Amway, it was pure cult-behavior, lots of high-fives and LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH type slogans. (ok not that bad but you get waht I mean).

Basically never showed up again, never took the test required to sell insurance, and never paid the friend back. In later years this dude was no longer my bestie cuz of frequent dick-headed shit he pulled like this.

so gross

I mentioned them in therapy last week and my therapist had a pronounced facial reaction to the name, one of revulsion. she broke in to say "I hate those people. They used to be located in my own building and tried to solicit my patients".

So there's a new MLM going around with Japanese titanium(-coated) cookware? $5k for a set that would cost ~$1000 for a top of the line stainless set.

I can see conning people into a couple of hundred bucks here and there on essential oils but how the fuck do you convince someone to drop $5k on pots and pans?

Via Facebook, I've been watching the daughter of a family frend getting sucked into one of these travel multi-level scams. She's just constantly bragging about how her life is going to change and how she'll soon be independently wealthy soon, yadda yadda yadda. I'd almost feel sorry for the inevitable crash and burn, if she wasn't so annoying aggressive with trying to rope others into it too. The travel club is W0rldV3ntures, lots of talk about how it's a scam. One example here.

Point being, if someone on your FB feed starts posting pictures of themselves holding a blue "YOU SHOULD BE HERE" sign, keep your distance, they'll soon get very annoying about wanting "to share this awesome adventure!" with you.

You can buy a pure titanium 1.3 liter cooking pot for about $80 at REI. Titanium isn't an especially good heat conductor and tends to have hot spots, but it is a bit lighter and stronger than aluminum, but backpackers mostly just use their ti pots to boil water in.

Meaning, $5K is utterly ridic and who wants titanium cookware anyway?

Adamantium cookware or GTFO, bub.

The only way they'll take my cast-iron cookware is from my cold, dead fingers

There's a creepy overlap between this stuff and motivational speaking/self-help. I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGbAh95jtP8

Fake crying at 14:30.

found it: http://www.saladmaster.com/display/router.aspx

Apparently they set you up with cast iron, stainless steel, teflon and SALADMASTER with water and baking soda or something, then you taste each one and recognize how amazingly neutral the SALADMASTER pans are.
The person who told me about it said their host had tried selling them on the flavor angle but I imagine a bunch of them do it because of chemicals leeching into your precious fluids.

These particular hucksters are really good at SEO, if you search for Saladmaster and scam/MLM it comes up with 'reviews' about how it's so totally not a scam.

someone on my FB feed asking 'all (his) friends who sell juiceplus / herbalife' how many people they were expected to recruit in order to set themselves up as distributors. I said it was a pyramid scheme but no one really took notice. Never mind.

This American Life segment on the Wake Up Now cult
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/543/wake-up-now?act=1

man, reading about that smallville sex cult this morning...so crazy.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/smallville-actress-allison-mack-arrested-for-alleged-role-in-sex-slave-cult-nxivm-2018-04-20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsxHKDgvhYY

this is the inspirational pyramid sex cult leader's FIRST pyramid scheme. an infomercial featuring Eddie Albert! say it ain't so, Eddie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7kZBQCIrQM&t=469s

http://static-30.sinclairstoryline.com/resources/media/935d7d6a-049a-49fb-a836-920f61f2f5c3-large16x9_AllisonMack3CreditJaneRosenberg.jpg?1524277151918

the perp's face in that sketch deserves a spot in santorum.jpg

so my sister is deep into ItWorks, which is some pure bullshit, keto coffee and body wraps and the like. I can't imagine she's making any money off it; my sister is morbidly obese and the #bossbabe pictures she posts of herself are heavily filtered. She seems to have no innate conception of how to sell this shit either; for instance, she posted a picture of overdue bills with a long note about how she's so glad she has her #supplementalincome to help with that. Yeah, if it was doing so well for you why do you have collections notices at all? I've not broached the subject of any of this with her because we're honestly not that close, and she only tried to add one friend of mine on FB and rope them into it (she was ignored), but the whole thing is a bit depressing.