I've been sucked into forever living!! Why do I feel like the bad guy?

[KindergartenKop]

Recently an acquaintance emailed me to ask if I could 'help' her by trying a few products and giving her some feedback. Being the nice person I am I agreed. When the bag of samples turned up the penny dropped and i realised that she's trying to sell them to me (I'm naive I know!). I thought id just buy a little bubble bath. Its fucking 14 quid! No way. I'm sending the bag back and pleading eczema. Does this whole company operate by guilting friends and family into purchasing crap quality at ridic prices?

I have a new one of today. Another one who thinks it is her new 'career'

it's so sad all this FL stuff. All these (mostly) women who want to work and make money - they get sucked into this and think they are actually business owners. Wouldn't they be better off tenping or in office jobs with a real monthly salary. or even setting up a proper business (corporation tax, vat, invoices etc - none of that with FLP right?)

I went to a recruitment meeting once with a friend. it was just a series of people parading up on stage going on a boyt how much money theyd made. serious money, Mortgages paid off, boats, holidays etc. How do they get away with it? I just can't see how any of it can be true? surely everyone is either in FLP or can totally see through it like us in which case who else is there left to recruit?

and where is all the scientific evidence about the benefits of one random plant based product? and why the hell are they all eating it!!!!

the whole thing mystifies me.

Well, aloe vera is well known to be useful and beneficial for a lot of things. Probably the majority of people are aware of that, so it was a very clever choice of plant. Then they feed into the idea a lot of people have that natural=better, there are miracle cures in nature etc.

But OTOH, it's a very narrow base, even in the context of MLM. There's always going to be a significant minority of people who either don't like aloe vera or react badly to it in some way. So they're never going to buy. And of those who do like it, most of them won't want every little thing to smell of it. There's a limit to how much aloe vera you can flog, which is why I'm surprised people don't question why the sellers are so keen to recruit them. We can't all get rich selling something most people will only want a bit of. It's different to something like eg Arbonne, where you might think the mascara is disgustingly tacky but odds are there's probably one shade of lippy you like. That is, the potential customer base seems wider. And yet FL seems to be the most popular. I suppose cosmetics mostly only sell to females 12 or above, whereas you can try and get the whole population on 'health' products.

imo it appeals to the natural-loving, anti-science/big pharma types.

What I really want to say to these women is: yes you can do anything. Start educating yourself while your kids are young. Take courses. Do something difficult. Then when they're at school you can have a meaningful career in something that is genuinely useful, instead of flogging aloe shite to the gullible.

or, like the pp said, start your own real business.

sparechange - From the MLM The American Dream Made Nightmare

'We are not confronted with an ordinary scam here, we are dealing with non-rational belief. Something radical is happening to certain MLM victims' minds and they are undergoing a form of religious conversion - this makes them exclude all quantifiable evidence which proves MLM to be a dangerous fairy story. MLM is to economics what creationism to genetics. In fact, it's economic creationism.'

I have a younique and an actiderm friend. They're not too bad bar the usual "so glad I joined blah blah".
Today however I got a friend request from someone who is friends with the actiderm friend. No idea who she is, had a nosy at her page (for mn research of course) and she's a juice plus bot!
The obligatory feet in the garden pics were there and the inspirational quotes.
The worst thing was #letsgetgorjiss
What the actual fuck.

My actiderm friends get a gift from actiderm every week. A charm bracelet or a bath robe . "Best non job eva" (sic)

I had a msg a while back from a complete random person (possibly through a local group) asking me to be on her team, obviously though with the usual cloak and dagger aspect to it. No trying to get me to buy something, just be on her team. It was full of the usual 'life/work balance' stuff. I replied in a bit of a huff, probably because I was about to go back to work due to a change of circumstances after 7yrs being at home and I wasn't in the mood to be told that this was the perfect opportunity for my family.

I had someone I worked with 4 years ago FB message me recently asking if she could send me some FL stuff. Fobbed her off, but I'm starting to wish I'd said yes. Would've been interesting to read! She did the most ridiculous hard sell.

There is going to be a forever stall at our nct summer party

The money is made selling tickets to the events, books, training etc. Not from the product. The product is a front and they don't care if they never sell a drop of it.

Melonfool - 'The money is made selling tickets to the events, books, training etc. Not from the product. The product is a front...'

You are right, but the MLM companies themselves are fronts, because other companies are used to sell the tickets to the events, books, training etc.

Again from 'The American Dream Made Nightmare' :

'All MLM racketeers hide behind mystifying Mafia-style labyrinths of apparently independent corporate structures. These labyrinths are maliciously designed to prevent, and/or divert, investigation and isolate the MLM racketeers from liability. The setting up of such a hermetic system in order to commit crimes and obstruct justice, is defined as forming an overall pattern of ongoing major racketeering activity by the US federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 1970.'

With Amway - on which FL seems to be based - Amway itself makes money on the products purchased by the Individual Business Owners.(No-on retails, even though they only escaped prosectution as pyramid scam buy saying all IBOs must make 10 retail sales per month. This is never enforced, and would be impossible in practice as the products are too expensive).
But in Amway the senior "pins" make the $$$ on selling tools to the downline (tapes, books, and seminars). As a further twist, the tools reinforce the cult and the events are designed to stop critical thinking. The more the dupe invests in the cult the harder the habit is to break - no one wants to admit they've been conned - until either the dupe goes bankrupt, wakes up or (vanishingly unlikely) is able to join the other high-pin fraudsters dividing the loot at the next convention. of course the latter would involved complete moral abandonment, as you are then part of the rip-off exploiting the new IBOs.

FL seems to take a more direct approach to the scams - does the company or the senior pins hold the events? Are the seior pins paid for each of their downline who pays to attend? I don't know.

Please note that the difference betweenm MLMs and illegal "gifting clubs"(Hearts, WEW anyone?) is that there is a "product" in exchange for the cash, and members are expected to retail. In practice, there is no difference in passing cash to the top of the pyramid directly, or in exchange for some useless vitamins or overpriced Aloe juice.

Could anyone with an FL friend ask them politely how much they spend on each event?

Just WAIT until your friends get sucked into Wealth Dragons.....

That is going to possibly lose them A LOT of money, as they are not tricked into selling juice, lotions and potions, but get into debt to buy off the founders derelict property portfolios and become multi millionaires!

Xenu1 - From the American Dream Made Nightmare.

Any alleged 'income opportunity' which doesn't have a significant and sustainable source of revenue other than its own contibuting participants, is quite obviously a dissimulated closed-market swindle, or pyramid scam, in which participants have been deceived into buying infinite shares in their own finite money in the false-expectation of future reward.

Thus, when examining any so-called 'MLM income oportunity,' the products are a distracting smokescreen, the real purpose of which is to launder unlawful losing-investment payments; for the only common-sense question is:

What is the real motivation for 'MLM' participants to keep handing over their money and wasting their own time, and money, endlessy trying to recruit others to do the same?'

Lately, and only because they are under FBI, FTC and SEC investigation, the bosses of the 'Herbalife' racket have pretended that, for the overwhelming majority of participants, the motivation is only to obtain the products at discount prices, and they have even pointed to internal 'Amway' copy-cat 'retail sales' rules which makes this appear to be so, but clearly the motivation for the overwhelming majority has been the false expectation of a future reward, because (for more than 3 decades) effectively 100% of all 'Herbalife's' constantly-churning participants have failed to generate an overall net-profit, whilst the 'retail sales' rules are not independently enforced and commisions have been offered to participants on their own purchases and on the purchases of their own recruits and those of the recruits of their recruits, etc., ad infinitum.

For decades, every single transient 'MLM' adherent (and we are talking countless of millions of individuals around the globe) has been obliged to sign an annually renewable (take it or leave it) contracts which clearly identified them as 'distributors,' not 'customers.' Suddenly, when faced with federal investigation, closure and prosecution, the bosses of the 'Herbalife' racket have modified the wording of these contracts. Laughably, 'distributors' are now 'members.'

Thus, the final tragicomic defence of all 'MLM income opportunity' racketeers is:

Read the word 'seller' as 'buyer' stupid, and then our fraud is legal!

There's a FL stall at every fete / fair / event ... they never sell anything though

Apart from the detox line are the products good? I do hear positive things about the actual products, or is it a case of they are no better than the range from H&B just at 3x the price?

trinitybleu - Once upon a time, didn't there used to a snake oil seller at virtually every fair and fete?

Again from The American Dream Made Nightmare:

__

Common sense tells us that, in countries like the UK and USA, no one actually sells anything like this anymore, the door to door peddling of cheap and cheerful goods died out with the rise of supermarkets. The Internet put the final nail in the coffin of traditional direct selling.

Some of the biggest traditional direct selling companies, like Avon, have lately felt obliged to introduce multi-level pay plans, but without the cult-style tactics, and they are still struggling to survice.

MLM income opportunity rackets merely pretend to be traditional direct selling companies, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Average persons in the street are all witnesses to the obvious fact that would-be millionaire MLM recruiters are literally everywhere, but MLM direct sellers (i.e. non-salaried commission agents making their living by regularly retailing products to the general public, based on value and demand) simply don't exist.

MLM direct selling is a classic example of a big lie that has been repeated so often that many people (sadly, including regulators, legislators and journalists) have come to believe that it's true.

my mum was a 'Shakley' vitamins consultant when I was a good, bootfuls of the stuff in our house, utter crap.

I currently have Younique, Body Shop, Jamies's and Forever living friends pestering me. All overprice crud.
the minute you sign up and get your first bulk delivery the someone at the top gets a pay cheque and you never get anywhere

mlmtheamericandreammadenightmare.blogspot.fr/2015/06/forever-living-products-flp-cult-secte.html

My blood ran cold reading how FLP is actually a cult, because it's pretty much the same technique my abusive ex used to groom me while I was mentally ill but still independent (initially) and then keep me there, always trying to be the person he wanted me to be, and never quite achieving it.

I first came across FL products 11 years ago, and bought the aloe juice for my son who had really bad eczema. It seemed to calm his skin down.

At that time, I felt that FL was selling an above average product. I was able to sign up to be a distributor just in order to get a discount on the aloe juice - I didn't try to sell any myself and didn't have to buy anything.

But buying the juice for regular consumption was expensive and it became difficult to sustain. So, even though I thought it was a good product I had to stop buying it.

I don't know what has happened in the past 11 years for FL to have become such a dirty word. The products are fine - they are just supplements and people buy supplements all the time - but obviously the recruiting has become cult like and FL would seem to have shot themselves in the foot. Which is a shame.

I thought folk were exagerating about the OTT cult like following.had a look at a few ladies on FB and my goodness. You're right, they are all spouting the same mantra, showing off how well they are doing, the laptop garden pics etc. Who does this? My husband is a high earner, many of my friends earn well have very comfortable lifestyles - no one goes on lke that, no one. One lady is putting her son in private school, a soaring manager or such. Seems someone printed something negative about what she was posting and brought them all out of the woodwork in defence.

It's horrible - many if the posters on that netmums thread are obviously young struggling mums, desperate to make some money. Being sucked in and most will lose money and be spat out feeling a complete failure.

Wow. I've been reading the longer Netmums thread and even though I understand how the MLM process works and the warnings on this thread, the 'positive' FL message is reinforced so much that it got me thinking in the back of my head that maybe it might work!

Had to give myself a good slap! You can see how people who are vulnerable get sucked in...