Friend taking the piss with home business

[Magicnumbers]

A good friend is supported financially by DH and has recently decided to go into one of these multi level marketing beauty businesses. It's set her back quite a lot to buy all the products.

Suddenly her Facebook account is full of adverts and I have had the sales patter for these products every time we've met.

Keen to support her, I bought a couple of things. They were okay, but really expensive. I have politely declined to buy more but I still keep getting messages from her asking if I want anything more. She's done this will loads of friends in the area and she's so lovely but at least one person I know has shut off contact after a hard sell to recruit her too.

Now there are posts on Facebook with photos of her with her young DS on all these walks and out at clubs with hashtags and captions like "do what you love" "work from home" "would never miss this time with my boy" etc, right next to posts saying "who can help me reach my target this month? Just need two more sales of x product?". This goes to working parents who don't get to take their children to the same things she goes to with her boy because they are working- but she wants them to use their earnings to keep her in business, then posts (slightly smug) stuff like that.

To stop myself from getting more annoyed I have hidden her feed on Facebook, but (a) is she being unreasonable/insensitive and (b) should I try to say anything to her? Am I being crap in not supporting her more? She's my mate, I want her to do well, but this feels like the wrong way of going about keeping friends.

It's the maths that's really startling. If you work on the basis that each new recruit needs to recruit six people to show any consistent profit, by only 13 levels of recruitment they'd have almost double the bots selling the stuff than there are people on earth. So every single person would be a sales rep for Forever Living, with no purchasers not themselves supposedly making money, and even then you don't have enough people on the planet.

The pyramid looks like this:

6
36
216
1296
7776
46656
279936
1,679,616
10,077,696
60,466,176
362,797,056 (this exceeds the population of the USA)
2,176,782,336
13,060,694,016 (this massively exceeds the global population, in fact it's almost doubled)

The real reason these companies make money is they con customers into thinking they are franchisees, and so make them fanatically loyal spenders. Indentured customers, in fact. It's horrible because they do it in such a manipulative way, and target women especially in a vulnerable life stage, quite often: young kids, want to work but are in a bit of a childcare trap. Promises the world and takes their money. A scam by any genuine definition.

What are the numbers if you're selling younique at pink / blue level? I surmised it was £1-200 a month!

The notquiteafairytale blog linked previously is great. The author had a family member that made her promise to keep a spreadsheet of her incomings and outgoings, and it was partially this that enabled the author to break free of the scam. Could you encourage your friend to do the same? She'll probably kick back against any overt pleas to drop the thing entirely because she's been suckered in by the 'motivational' bullshit. But seeing those figures in plain black and white speaks for itself.

The author had a family member that made her promise to keep a spreadsheet of her incomings and outgoings, and it was partially this that enabled the author to break free of the scam.

That's such a good idea. Think I may pinch it for the person I know well enough to do it.