To say no to Usborne seller

[Greyrootszerohoots]

Small business owner, just making ends meet but try to support local community. Been approached by an usborne seller asking me to support local school, as they have books to ready donate if I can contribute £50.

Is cheeky fuckery afoot here?!

Suggest she buys £50 worth of goods/services from your business which you will then ‘donate’ to a worthy cause instead.

She's selling the books to you, making the commission and then delivering them to rhe school so it looks like she is donating them herself.

If you wanted to spend £50 on books for your local school, I’d recommend buying them from The Book People. Often you can get 10 books for £10 and there’s usually a few Usborne book sets on there too. There’s absolutely no need to buy books (or anything) via a hun.

Ask what exactly is she donating?

Because it appears to me that YOU would be in fact buying a bundle of random books for the school that they may not actually want, ie already have copies of. Maybe they'd rather buy other books from different sources. Can they get better buy discount elsewhere?

But ultimately I think I'd say no. I'd rather donate to the school directly.

It's not really a donation if you have to pay for it is it?!? Sounds very cheeky indeed!

Exactly. My local Tesco has several hundred thousand pounds worth of 'donations to my local food bank' - if only I go in with the world's biggest trolley and buy it all.

If you run a small business, that's your livelihood, just like if you were in a salaried job. Why do people expect small business owners to have to budget for emotionally-enforced giving to charity when they wouldn't dream of insisting that a local teacher, postman, nurse, road-sweeper or driving instructor do the same from their livelihood?

At any rate, if you did choose to donate, the obvious thing to do would be to donate your own stock or services, so that your donation could go further at less cost to you and generate goodwill, which could ultimately benefit your business: win-win. Some of the big supermarkets have genuine community giving schemes in place, but this would be like approaching Tesco and asking them to donate Aldi gift vouchers as a prize for your Brownies raffle!

Exactly. My local Tesco has several hundred thousand pounds worth of 'donations to my local food bank' - if only I go inwith the world's biggest trolleyand buy it all.

Slightly different, tescos and other supermarkets very often donate food that's near the end of its shelf life to food banks - as well as the stuff that shoppers donate.

You're basically buying £50 of random books for a school. The Usborne seller isn't donating anything, but she is getting commission on the £50

I like @PiffleWiffleWoozle's suggestion: Suggest she buys £50 worth of goods/services from your business which you will then ‘donate’ to a worthy cause instead.

I've not come across an MLM that isn't ridiculously pushy. I ignore them, personally.

Slightly different, tescos and other supermarkets very often donate food that's near the end of its shelf life to food banks - as well as the stuff that shoppers donate.

Yes, they CHOOSE themselves to donate THEIR OWN stuff, along with goods that customers have been generally invited (i.e. not approached or pressured) to give to a good cause as well. However community-minded Tesco might be, you'll never find them buying Sainsburys' nearly-out-of-date stock off them and donating that.

@PineForestsAndSunshine

Is cheeky fuckery afoot here?!

Yes. Most certainly.

A PTA mum recently tried to organise a “Tropic Skincase Pamper Evening” to raise money for the school. For just £5 per ticket you could enjoy a “welcome drink, nibbles and raffle ticket”. Presumably followed by an MLM sales pitch. But at least the school are getting £5 from each ticket sale, right? Wrong. They would “benefit from a percentage of the sales” made on the evening. Half of the CF’s commission to be exact.

The event was cancelled due to “concerns about covid” when no tickets were sold.

It’s not just the MLM Hun making commission off any sales on the back of charity. She is also using the charitable cause to boost her volumes because she needs to hit targets. Further more she is likely to be recording details of people in order to try and recruit them as she may well have discovered that the only way to make any money in MLM is to recruit others (you know, a bit like a pyramid scheme). That Tropic person needs to be careful about running raffles and taking £5 off people as there are rules about that sort of thing. Sounds like it didn’t go to well for her.

Another MLM famous for exploiting charity is Forever Living. They invite people to “sponsor” a “care pack” (skincare and cosmetics donated to a breast cancer charity for a patient). They know this is an emotive subject so likely to pull in the punters. Instead of donating £20 hard cash direct to the charity the FL Hun invites the donator to sponsor a product for the care pack. They hand over £20 for a deodorant or whatever (it’s very overpriced). The Hun gets her commission and improves her volume and FL gets their profit. The charity/person gets a basket of overpriced products worth considerably less than the “sponsors” paid, and everyone who hasn’t worked out what’s going on says “oh how lovely and charitable FL is”. All the MLMs are at it.

As for Usbourne. Why anyone signs up to that scam I’ll never know, when you can buy their books cheaper elsewhere. Don’t get involved or you’ll never hear the end of it. I wish people would stop falling for these scams. These people are pushy because they’re desperate- 99.6% of people signing up to an MLM lose money.

@AdobeWanKenobi

Remember the start of the pandemic? One enterprising MLM hun here was offering to donate a hand cream to the nurses at our local hospital. All you had to do was send her a fiver and she'd drop them off...

Yep, that was an Avon and Body Shop at Home favourite trick.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Slightly different, tescos and other supermarkets very often donate food that's near the end of its shelf life to food banks - as well as the stuff that shoppers donate.

Yes, they CHOOSE themselves to donate THEIR OWN stuff, along with goods that customers have been generally invited (i.e. not approached or pressured) to give to a good cause as well. However community-minded Tesco might be, you'll never find them buying Sainsburys' nearly-out-of-date stock off them and donating that.

My post was to the poster who pointed out that Tesco seem to take all the credit for the thousands of pounds worth given to Food Bank. When in her view it all seemed to be stuff purchased by Tesco shoppers and Tesco profit from a chunk of those donations too.

I work for a small children's charity and have been approached by usborne a couple of times. They usually ask if we will give permission for them to fundraise on our behalf to purchase books for use in the charity...!

She is also using the charitable cause to boost her volumes because she needs to hit targets.

It's the equivalent of standing outside a food bank and harassing the people going in with bags of food to donate to buy some overpriced Prosecco in a collectable presentation crystal bottle from you to add to their donation, guilting them into believing that the recipients are truly desperate for it.

I agree with PP: it's a real shame about Usborne's shady sales techniques, as a lot of their books really are very good.

I always thought the same about Readers' Digest when they used to have their extremely suspicious prize-draw-based hard-selling schemes, but they seem to have mended their ways over the last few years (or the law has caught up with them and their erstwhile guile).

You'd expect such desperate and 'shady' methods to be used for hawking complete rubbish, not decent well-produced stuff.

My post was to the poster who pointed out that Tesco seem to take all the credit for the thousands of pounds worth given to Food Bank.

You quoted me, though?! Sorry for any confusion - I think we're basically singing from the same hymn sheet

Here’s a great article on the subject of MLM and charity www.talentedladiesclub.com/articles/dont-donate-to-charities-through-mlms-why-their-good-deeds-arent-as-innocent-as-they-seem/

@SteakExpectations

If you wanted to spend £50 on books for your local school, I’d recommend buying them from The Book People. Often you can get 10 books for £10 and there’s usually a few Usborne book sets on there too. There’s absolutely no need to buy books (or anything) via a hun.

The Book People ceased trading a couple of years ago, but schools often have an Amazon wish list of books they’d like. They also quite likely have a trade account with a company like Browns BFS which are often cheaper than Amazon.

She wants you to buy the books she has but no one else wants for the school. Cheeky mare.

Some of the Usborne books are good quality.

A lot of unpaid reps ('consultants') end up with random undesirable stock that is very difficult to sell especially at the RRP. They end up running sales to shift stock and this leads to making a big loss.

@AdobeWanKenobi

Remember the start of the pandemic? One enterprising MLM hun here was offering to donate a hand cream to the nurses at our local hospital. All you had to do was send her a fiver and she'd drop them off...

Oh I remember this. I actually worked at the hospital our local MLM hun was trying to "donate" hand cream to.

I commented thanking her for endeavours but saying that we were fine thanks. We did receive lots of donations (genuine I believe, not money making scans) and while we were grateful for the thoughts it also felt a bit unnecessary. Mainly because while lots of people were furloughed or suffering losses to their business we were still earning the same as before. Certainly wouldn't have wanted anyone making commission off the kindness of others in my name.