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

@YouokHun 😂😂😂😂

I don't admire any celebrity enough to drink a manky orange drink.

The80sweregreat

No. Certainly not any better than you can find at Superdrug in their own brand range for an absolute fraction of the cost.

Because the products don’t actually matter, they’re just vehicles for the flow of money up the pyramid. They’re phenomenally overpriced, the products made very cheaply and poor quality as there has to be a huge profit margin so the seller can get a cut, as can their upline, and their upline, and the company itself.

Google some of the prices of younique makeup for example. My lord. They’re charging as much for a crappy cardboard eyeshadow palette that’s dusty/muddy and has no pigment as Urban Decay do for their incredible quality, best selling Naked palettes

Www.reddit.com/r/youniquemua has some spectacular examples of the quality of their products.

Even if the odd item was okay it’s hugely overpriced and funds a predatory unethical business model. Of course you’ll never hear anything from sellers than ‘omg this product is the best ever’. They FaceTune and photoshop their before and after pictures so much so that they often accidentally blur out their own noses 😂

@CrystalShark thank you, I thought I was aware of the main MLMs, this one snuck by me though.

Although shockingly people seem to rate these pans. I won't be allowing strangers into my house to make me a salad to find out however.

MediocreOmens I’m sure the pans are great, it’s just that no pans can possibly be worth that much, especially from an MLM where you know sooooo much margin is added on for everyone to get their cut. And ya know, it’s supporting such an awful business model.

I do suspect there’s a degree of cognitive dissonance and denial going on too. Nobody who spends thousands on pans is gonna admit they’re a bit crap or okay but no better than the ones they had before that cost maybe 10% of what their saladmaster pans cost. Too painful to realise you’ve been a mug. And the majority of people who own a set are reps (cos you get them cheaper signing up), so they’re not gonna be anything but positive about them. It’s all very emperor’s new clothes!

Crystal, I thought as much!

I do feel for this person as she is really trying to make some money and not have to go outside the home to work and leave her kids in very expensive childcare. I'm not sure if it's working out , but I would imagine she may have lost a few friends along the way as it's a pushy way of selling and skin care is a saturated market already.

The Man from Del Monte

What is a MLM anyway? Sorry for being stupid..I've just never heard it before!

Laxative coffee! Hahahahaha

It won’t be working out at all if she wasn’t one of the people that got in at the very beginning, friends and family of the founders or one of the early adopters in a new territory. And even then, that doesn’t guarantee anything unless an MLM really takes off. Unless she has a huge number of downlines she won’t be making a penny, certainly nowhere near minimum wage for the hours she’s putting in. All while alienating her friends and family.

But they’re psychologically so manipulative. Even I, someone who’s well versed in MLMs and knows exactly what goes on behind closed doors, end up semi wanting to believe their wild claims if I spend enough time on fb scrolling through the top MLM shillers. Even the new ones who aren’t even breaking even! Because they lie so confidently and frequently, you see enough posts and it’s hard to believe someone would lie through their teeth so happily, you start to kinda doubt whether they are actually lying. But they are. The numbers don’t stack up. If they don’t sell enough their uplines blame them for not trying hard enough or having a positive enough attitude.

There’s even a whole psychological scheme built into MLM culture ‘the law of attraction’ where if you visualise and want something badly enough it’ll happen. Therefore if you’re not selling you’re just not trying hard enough or don’t want it enough. Puts the blame squarely on the person at the bottom of a pyramid.

Can’t recommend Elle Beau’s blog enough.

Don't know if it's been mentioned before but there's a pretty interesting documentary on bbc about mlm

Be forewarned and forearmed against huns ;)

ellebeaublog.com/poonique/

One of my SILs and her DH actually bought stuff from MLMs and believed all the hype. They "saw the ligth" about some new product every second year or so and preached to everybody else about it. Please notice: they didn't even sell these products, they just believed the adverts. They had to dial down on the preaching a bit after they tried to hijack some mutual friends' party for the person who was their present product gury at the time. We had a email chain going round about the party and all of a sudden they just announced that they had invited her to come and tell us all about her "fantastic products that would change our lives". The hostess was livid! We had previously warned her that the SIL could be a CF, but she had been sure that WE were just being dramatic. LOL. She learned the hard way. They stopped seing my SIL and her DH a couple of years later, because they realized the "friendship" was onesided and that they only heard from SIL and her DH when they needed a favour.

@The80sweregreat these are not product companies, they are recruitment devices. The distributors are so often the end customer and many sales of product are internal. Therefore as the products are not the key focus for the corporates they tend to be overpriced and unproven. Generally they’d have little or no success in an open market. Imagine a Younique mascara (£23) v an Charlotte Tilbury or Clinique mascara (£23 and c.£20), one has to be ordered on line and comes with endless follow up and isn’t a very good product by all accounts and is very dated, the others can be bought online or over the counter in a non pushy environment and have had to be good enough to compete in a competitive market of real customers who will switch brands at the drop of a hat. The legitimate brands can be tried and tested and samples taken home to try. Which would you trust? Even if the products were amazing buying them would be supporting a system that is stacked against people for the benefit of a few people at the top.

I have one on Facebook and I find it quite entertaining. I can see if I had more than one it would get on my nerves. Mine goes off to conferences in America every few months. She seems to stay for two nights, which to me sounds exhausting more than fun after traveling so far. It has never been mentioned, but I am guessing that she is paying the travel costs herself.

Ugh!

Anybody can be sucked into MLM, if targeted at a vulnerable time. It has no bearing on intelligence. New exhausted mums, someone whose become unemployed, someone with huge debts.
The shameless exploitation and then not wanting to admit it's all bullshit keeps many people in. I've seen friends pulled right in only to be spat back out with bullying and nastiness when they leave the mlm.

I'm so stressed from a Brexit thread I'm coming off MN for the night! BUT if anyone fancies learning more about MLMs then John Oliver's take on them is glorious:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MwGeOm8iI

I have a very active LinkedIn account as I do marketing to businesses so spend a lot of time on there - I've just finished maternity leave and my headline status said that. I have been inundated with offers of flexible work from home MLM style "work". It's so annoying and total bullshit, trying to pray on women who feel guilty about going back to work and just want to be good mum's.

I know one, who is successful. She built up her “business” and gave up a well paid managerial marketing position to be a hunbot. She is actually a kind and caring person and would help anyone out if asked. I struggle to see how she can be so disconnected from who she is as a person and how she must be exploiting her downlines. I genuinely think she must be so sucked into it that she cannot see what she’s doing.

My cousins husband has just ‘set up a business’ selling water filters. The website apparently has photos of him and my cousin and kids in the promotional pictures, I am very suspicious it is a MLM, has anyone come across it? I don’t know the name unfortunately.

My sister started doing a candle one. Apparently they were not too bad but yes her earnings were always sucked back in to buy new products for her parties. She was actually advised by her consultant at the job centre that it was the perfect job for her as she could prove she was working but wouldn't earn enough to come off benefits. My sister has a pile of health issues and if she did a party for a few hours one night she would be bed ridden for the next few days.

She ended up stopping because her new consultant said it didn't count as work as she wasn't earning enough. We now have enough Party lite stuff to light up a mansion. Luckily her benefits have now been sorted but it was a shit time.

MLMs do suck in the vulnerable but when you have 'consultants' saying they are a good thing!

You know, it probably takes less time to Google "what is an MLM" than type a post on Mumsnet.

Many people who do work from home jobs do not know how to do it properly. I am a real estate agent who also owns a landscaping and painting business. I joined an MLM 7 months ago and I have never posted anything about it on my social media. If I think you are a good candidate, I will offer to share it with you, ONCE. If it's for you great, if not, nothing changes. That is a rookie mistake, of posting all over,l. People will already know what you do and will have made up their mind before you speak to them. MLM businesses work, if you have the skills needed, as in any other peofession. Sounds like your friend has not been trained properly and unfortunately became one of those who others may consider unfriending as that behavior in annoying and unwelcomed in platforms made to socialize. If it's a real friend, just mute her posts for a while. She is simply trying to make some additional income.

Are the skin care range they sell on these schemes any good?

I think the general consensus is that they're not bad, but nowhere near worth the money they charge for them. You'd be better sticking to Boots.

I know one, who is successful

No, you know one who SAYS she is successful. You have no idea of the real state of her finances. Fake it till you make it. Smoke and mirrors.

Figures show that something like 99.7% of people lose money, or break even. Is your friend in that 0.3%? Maybe. But far more likely that she's lying through her teeth about how deep in she is.

MLM businesses work, if you have the skills needed, as in any other peofession

Classic MLM tactic - there's nothing wrong with the business model, if it doesn't work for you, then you are the problem. You're not trying hard enough. You have the wrong mindset.

I actually do have a proper work at home job/business which is not MLM. But I have lost count of the times I've been out with people from school or whatever and someone asks what I do, I say I work for home for myself and the look of absolute horror which comes over their face because they think I'm going to launch into a pitch. These MLM hunbot sales reps give the rest of us a very bad reputation.