To delete friend who has joined an MLM

[lastqueenofscotland]

A lady I know from work has joined an MLM selling some sort of laxative coffee.
Her FB and instagram are covered in posts for it and about her promotions/trying to get a car etc etc.
She very much fits the profile of people they poach, she’s a SAHM and it’s been a squeeze of late for her.

I think MLMs are poisonous and I hate seeing her posts flogging this nonsense.
AIBU to remove her from my friend list

I agree that in this day and age there just really isn’t the need for the products/service that MLMs offer. Amazon and the internet in general allows for ease and convenience, next-day deliveries, comparison of different products and the best prices. Plus they are so many more shops offering makeup/beauty/homeware often at cheap prices. Nobody is going to want an overpriced scented candle that is nothing different or special or to buy an Usborne book that can be ordered online for three quid cheaper with next-day delivery.

@WagaMAM Arbonne is MLM and it’s a particularly unpleasant one in my mind, probably because I know a couple of high up huns and know they’ve totally lost their moral compass. If your friend thinks it’s not MLM she’s either done zero research or a bit of biased reading of the material she was pointed towards by her upline or she’s already lying. Arbonne is a big one for being ‘garage qualified’. Where I live it tends to be middle class women who have a good household income propping up their Arbonne hobby; that means they can afford to be a product of the product and buy a lot of product ‘to sell’ - these are Arbonne’s main customers. That demographic can have some success selling products because they are often selling to each other as there is a bit of money swilling around and because they are propped up by a legitimate income they can frame that income as being MLM success. The white Mercedes is not a gift. At a certain level you are given money to put towards a month leasing cost provided you continue to hit recruitment or product targets, the product targets being not sales but purchases (check out the garage, spare room and boot of that Merc; probably full of the Arbonne hun’s per chases. If you don’t hit targets the cash is stopped and you’re left with an expensive lease on a naffo car.

By the way, one high up Hun I know bullied a mutual friend into buying some kind of facial peel (hundreds of pounds) - she’s still under the care of a dermatologist as a result who had told her to keep right away from it.

Sorry about the lack of paragraphs ^

Of all of my friends the Arbonne seller was the most aggressive for sure.

My cousin does this shit. I decline all invites to her meetings and have muted everything else.

My cousin is Arbonne you’re definitely right about it being the middle class mummies doing it.

Also have a google for Arbonne’s Income Disclosure as they are one of the MLMs who publish this.
The income discloser will show just what a tiny percent earn any money from Arbonne even by their own admission. From the figures on the Income Discloser you then need to factor in that the ‘earnings’ are before tax and the expenses incurred (travel, post, IT, social media, Petrol, Prosecco etc). Then it’s also important to remember that the ID does not account for the people who bought into the MLM, lost money and quit within months - so the picture is EVEN worse than the income disclosure indicates - you could share that with your friend @WagaMAM!

Does anyone know about why Arbonne do weight loss and nutrition as well? A friend joined them as a wellness consultant Am struggling to see the connection between this and make up....(she doesn't do the make up side, only the weight loss).

Yabu though there is much entertainment to be had. A neighbour is an arbonne one massive conferences Las Vegas white Mercedes I find it fascinating and horrifying at the same time. Everyone else I know is boringly sensible and like minded so her fb is intriguing in a car crash way

@Maranello4 there isn’t much connection between the products and lots of MLM have as broader spread of product as possible. I know some ‘wellness’ snake oil is pretty generic and comes from the same source. I can think of one choc mint shake that is out of the one snake oil factory but sold as more than one mlm’s particular special weight loss elixir. I imagine having lots of products allows them to trawl with a wider net in the search for recruits and (sadly) tapping into the weight loss market has always been lucrative.

An ex friend of mine got sucked into this and may as well have grown a pair of horns whilst she was selling it. She was off the scale with her cheek and lack of awareness of how pushy she was.

She pitched it to me with the environmental angle (not bothered). The ethics (oh puhhhhhlease, no MLM brand has any ethics) and she even tried to convince me that her £15 bottle of face cream could get rid of my melasma (impossible)

Eventually she came to a garden party at my house, tried to sell to all my friends me then went through my Facebook profile to follow up with them after the party. I deleted and blocked her that day

I had PND after I had my dc. After several months I joined Mush and downloaded the app. I was messaged by a lady who lived near me who said she’d love to meet and I said I’d meet her for coffee - she said she did coffee mornings every week but I said I couldn’t go to that as we were doing something at the time so she said we could meet up 1:1. Off I toddled to meet her with dc - I hadn’t slept, my hair was a rats nest, I had no make up on and I was fat, and so far down in pnd it was lucky I didn’t walk into traffic. I sat in Morrisons cafe with this lady, who bought me some coffee. She was hugely glamorous, make up, white teeth, perfect hair etc. She talked about how being a mum was the best thing ever, and her partner was great too - how he was brilliant looking after their daughter and it allowed her to go back to work already. She said she’d just been on a work conference up in Liverpool and she’d had a great time partying up there with her colleagues too. She didn’t tell me where she worked and I didn’t ask either. She tried to get me to agree to come to a mums coffee morning again and again until I blocked her number. I now realise she was MLM, but in my seriously vulnerable state I could have been sucked in by her ‘hey, don’t worry, this will solve your problems, look at me! I love being a mum AND I work and make loads of money and look glamorous’. The PND coupled with the ultimate failure and expense of whatever the MLM was would have done me in.

Posted too soon. If I see anyone now doing MLM, I absolutely delete them. Not interested one bit.

@OkayGo that’s awful. I used to run a PND group for a MH Trust and noticed how many MLM Huns were buzzing around the Children’s Centre and Clinic where the group was held. I threw a massive strop about it and managed to get some HVs on side but as was said up thread, there needs to be some education among HCPs so that they can warn expectant and new parents that they could well be targeted. I can think of a few people who would have been helped by this.

@youokhun definitely. When your mind is in a fog and you think everyone’s doing a better job than you are anyway it’s horrible to think someone uses that to try and sell you something. Seriously shady and misleading. And all I wanted was to find other mums to talk to and who understood.

Good for you for complaining!

When my DDs were younger it was mostly franchise businesses and few MLMs being advertised on "working mum" jobsites. Requiring a massive upfront investment- mostly in the thousands- for very little actual return - a product and a name that wasn't well known at all. There are still loads of these around, non-jobs rather than proper jobs, not MLMs but can be just as bad and people can lose even more money.

@YouokHun

I used to run a PND group for a MH Trust and noticed how many MLM Huns were buzzing around the Children’s Centre and Clinic where the group was held. I threw a massive strop about it and managed to get some HVs on side but as was said up thread, there needs to be some education among HCPs so that they can warn expectant and new parents that they could well be targeted. I can think of a few people who would have been helped by this.

Omg this is horrific, trying to sign up new mothers at their most vulnerable.

That would be low for any business to do.

I think in general it would be amazing if a campaign was launched to combat MLM's imbalanced business structure.

It's not something in the national consciousness as I think "pyramid selling" is generally thought of as negative across the board but MLM isn't as well known a buzzword so people don't have the same instant "hope" factor.

Thank you for standing up for mums at your local health trust

Yup its Argonne my friend does - make up and diet. It's cultish.

Another one not mentioned here is Team Beachbody. It's in the US,UK and Canada.
They try and convince you that anyone can be a personal trainer which has the experts saying it's dangerous as these people have no training or health experience, then you have to shell out so much for the packs and shakes etc and are charged per month £15 to stay in it or something, didn't read all the details.
The hunbot that messaged me was involved in this, 'Vitrual Fit Fam' thing.
Her IG posts are long and like she's not taking a breath if she was saying it all,all this supposed inspirational/motivational stuff with tons of emojis, questions about goals and making the world a better place stuff, bouncy enthusiasm which made me roll eyes but sadly she's fully sucked in,full on hunbot.
These photos of her and her husband looking like they're living the perfect life and with her dogs and doing exercise videos are all fake and staged I'll bet and it's probably not even their house.

I've been researching Juice Plus a bit, and Isagenix, a well-being shake-selling MLM company. When you go on the Isagenix webpage, you can see their research papers, backing up the validity of their products. A few points to bear in mind, and this is based on the assumption that a lot of these companies are similar to Isagenix-
The research project are not government or university/hospital funded. Every single paper submitted as evidence, is funded by the Isagenix company themselves

Their peer reviews are done by, you guessed it, senior members of Isagenix itself, probably paid to endorse the products

The research papers are badly written, with numerous abbreviations and spouting pseudoscience, that makes you just want to skim read to the summary ( the whole point I believe!)

The summary just basically says Isagenix is brilliant. Of course it will say this

All of the papers actually are poorly designed and unscientific, with very small sample sizes, so not valid.

It just irritates me so much that people get sucked into these schemes. My friend who does Isagenix has insisted she's done her research, but the research is so appalling, and she can't see the word for the trees

My friends does beach body. She keeps messaging me about my 'weight'.

@MsTSwift I also have a Arbonne Merc owning hun on my fb friends list I wonder if it’s the same one! I am absolutely fascinated with it all it’s like a cult

@MsTSwift my Merc driving Hun is a Pilates teacher who recently left her DH for her mindset coach/Arbonne ManHun.

Yes, the JuicePlus studies are laughable. The huns often cite their very big study which was basically a survey of JP Huns asking them if the stuff they were shilling was any good. No bias there then. They often cite other people’s studies, extrapolating bonkers conclusions like (eg) where a vitamin in a non JP study has been shown to have a particular effect on a tumour in a mouse and therefore because the vit is in their vegetable dust capsule it therefore follows that JP cures cancer - that kind of nonsense. Crucially that bollocks doesn’t just come from the huns but from the corporate office. I can think of one high up JP Hun who has a big platform at the conferences to spout some serious antivax fiction on the back of being a quasi medic. So there is some dangerous fiction out there thanks to these “wellness” brands.

Several MLM’s ended up at a PND group. I couldn’t have anything to do with them after that as they didn’t want to stamp out on it in case it hurt their feelings.

So nobody had mentioned Actilabs!? Is that because it’s one of the newer ones or that people think it’s genuine? It’s a typical example of the type that promotes amazing gifts like holidays, cars and designer hand bags. This seems crazy as it’s aimed at those who need to make extra money so are probably struggling therefore surely they would rather have the cash than the ‘luxury’ item in their position 🤷🏻‍♀️