To the lady who doesnt like MLM companies. They are just women, mostly mums, who do not want to go out to work. They want to watch their child grown and earn money.
That's precisely why I despise the companies, @CoffeeQueenOfHerts. The sums are very clear - the only people making any money are the handful at the top, and they make it by lying to a lot of women, to persuade them to spend a fortune on "an investment" that will never pay off. The women most tempted are likely to be those who know that childcare is astronomical and believe that it's a way they can manage to look after their kids, work, and if they just try hard enough they can build a fabulous lifestyle for their families. And there's this thing called the sunk costs fallacy, which means once people have been suckered into a scam, they don't want to admit it to themselves, let alone anyone else, so they'll spend more trying to salvage the situation. So they end up working incredibly hard, annoying all those close to them, to sell products in a completely saturated market that they themselves have wasted stupid amounts of money on. They are the customers. They will have almost no customers. Because the only people who benefit from MLM are the owners, and the first one or two levels below them.
Real businesses don't like competition. You don't find restaurants trying to persuade every customer to open another franchise on the same street. The reason people constantly need to recruit a 'team' is because that's where the sales lie - the 'team' buying their own pack of products to sell on, most of which will never go anywhere.
The sums on this are clear. If the people at the top of a company recruit six people below them, and then six people below that, by the time you've got thirteen layers of a team - which given most of these companies are US based to start with, is entirely possible - you'd exceed the world's global population. And that means you would need every man, woman and child, all trying to sell one another one specific brand of lipstick (or health drink, or cleaning products, or essential oil) and no other customers, and you STILL wouldn't have enough people in the world.
The only regular customer base are the reps. If you look at that logically, most must be losing money, because if you are the customers and you take more money in than you spend, then the company is bankrupt. And they aren't, which is more than can be sad for some of their reps.
It's a pyramid scam and should be criminalised. The fact they predate on women just wanting to believe that they can work and be a mum and still have a good life is one of the reasons what they do is so appalling. They're impoverishing women, while also encouraging them to alienate their friends and family and lying that they will find a luxury lifestyle if they just shell out enough at the start. It's pretty twisted. I have several acquaintances who got sucked into this when they had preschoolers. All have quietly dropped it now and gone back to real jobs instead. None of them speak kindly of the companies if you ask.
Anyone who's doing a MLM is being scammed. They are the con's mark. And it's an especially cruel scam because by the time they face that and bow out, those most badly burned, and so financially worst off, are highly likely to have infuriated a lot of the people around them, so the sympathy will be limited.