To be upset about being invited to "Dinner"...

[Pakdooik]

... only to find it was an AMWAY sales pitch.

hahaha, just got another follow up call from Kleeneze 'hello, you expressed an interest in joining the Kleeneze family' 'er, no, I applied for a home working position, it did not mention Kleeneze in the advert as if it had I would not have applied. I have a telephone interview tomorrow for a proper job.' 'so shall I call you next week then?' Why is there no emoticon for 'ffs!'

I did a Common Purpose Course once.

That is similar - a cult.... totally freaky and full of wierd people you would not want to associate with. Plus it is very expensive.

A lovely friend of mine has been suckered into this juice plus thing, which as far as I can tell is just another one of these pyramid schemes.
Her Facebook feed is just constant sell sell sell, which is a shame because she used to put lovely, funny updates, and pics of her son.
She also keeps asking me to like and share her links etc, but I don't feel comfortable doing it as I don't want to be associated with it as I think it's a load of crap.

A friend of mine is a consultant for that 'Forever Living' aloe vera stuff and she does the same. All her Facebook statuses are now basically sales pitches for aloe vera along the lines of

'Long day's Christmas shopping at Bluewater today - so tired and such swollen aching feet. Thank heavens for wonderful Forever Living aloe vera foot gel - what on earth did I do before I discovered this stuff?'

and she yaps on and on about her 'amazing team' and what a privilege it is to work with such great inspirational women and to sell such a wonderful product, and how amazing and inspirational their latest sales conference was, yada yada.

Utterly bizarre. does she really think all these people she's known for years are so dim as to not be able to see right through it?

I really do find it most odd how people get swept up in these things. And let's face it, the whole party plan/pyramid scheme concept is very dubious - if a product can stand up to scrutiny it would be sold in the shops like everything else - we wouldn't need to be railroading our friends and colleagues into buying things out of some warped sense of duty.

I remember seeing some TV infomercial thing for some very expensive 'healthy cooking' gadget or other, where people were encouraged to invite 6 or eight friends for dinner and then prepare them a 'healthy' three course meal using this thing, and basically the whole meal was a demonstration of said gadget accompanied by a script, with a heavy sales pitch thrown in at the end.

I sat there like this hmm] and thought I'd rather poke my own eyes out than inflict something so awful on my dinner party guests. The whole idea of it makes me shudder with horror.

They've been going a while. I remember this happening to us over 30 years ago. Our eyebrows disappeared into our fringes.

We declined to get involved and every time we received another invitation from these friends we only accepted after making sure there was no Amway stuff going to happen. I don't think they had much success recruiting anyone.

I'm glad someone else thinks Common Purpose is gobbledygook

Em, I have an accomplished, professional, solvent friend who has been taken over by Juice Plus. I've had to unfollow her FB posts - it's constant sales crap,whereas as it used to be all posts about her and her pets, family etc. Not everyone's cup of tea, but that's what FB is for.

How do these companies turn bright, interesting people into such automatons?

Zombie thread alert!

Is thermomix a scheme? I had to block an instagram 'friend' as all of her updates were blatant plugs for the product

Ah yes, Thistle. Revived to advertise some pyramid bollocks, too.

Oh so it is. What an odd thread to reignite.

Thistledew - I think you're supposed to ask MoCox what the wonderful company she inspirationally works for is so she can give you more information. Get with it

Aaah. I see it was reignited by someone who has an pro-mlm agenda.

I had a neighbour who loved to invite people to parties which really were sales pitches for whatever her thing of the month was. Pampered chef, Neil's yard, some horrible shabby chic catalog thing and a Swiss beauty regime.

Weirdly shed get really upset when people stopped going and decided everyone hated her. Rather than us hating the hard sell. I explained it gently one day after she wailed at me about it, and she never spoke to me again!

Zombie thread

this may be zombie but I am loving a bit of self delusion!

Interested to know if Thermomix is a MLM as a lot of my friends have been persuaded to part with upwards of $1000 for a Thermomix and are suddenly all v evangelical about them

oh my god, are they still going?

years ago, we bought a house in a new area and the day we moved in, one of the neighbours came over, introduced themselves and invited us for drinks.

We thought they were lovely.

until we got to their house that evening.

after we made it very clear it was a HELL NO, the most we ever got out of them for the next 8 years until we moved, was a tight lipped nod if our paths crossed.

bonkers.

Something similar happened to me (come round for a glass of wine...) with a Pampered Chef party...

I hoot at the way those party plan evenings are dressed up as being something special and fun, a treat for those invited, a chance to get away from the kids for the evening and have a good chat with friends over a couple of glasses of wine and some nibbles. Whenever I've been (begrudgingly) to any you are shushed if you try to chat too much because you must all sit in an obedient row and pay attention to the demonstrator and then you are subtly made to feel like a grabby ingrate if you have the audacity to eat and drink and chat but not buy any overpriced toot that you could find in most shops for less, after all the trouble your poor hostess went to, with that warm Hock and Pringles.