'If you work for Walmart or McDonald's for instance, and your a chasier can you honest to god say there is any way in hell you are going to be earning anywhere near as much as a manager or CEO? You are working to make the people at the top rich, while you are living on "minimum wage" '
It is not a defining characteristic of pyramid schemes that those at the "top" earn more than those at the "bottom". That is true of pretty well all businesses. More relevant is where the risk is distributed. In a pyramid scheme all the risks gravitate to the bottom of the structure and those at the top are protected from them.
A pyramid scheme may be defined as follows: a business is a pyramid scheme if individual distributors' viability is contingent upon their recruiting other distributors. If a distributor can stay in business, never mind realise the returns claimed for the opportunity, merely by selling product and without recruiting others, then fair enough. By this measure Avon for example is not a pyramid scheme. Its distributor network is sustainable.
But if to make a living distributors have to recruit other distributors, then the scheme will collapse, and those at the bottom will get it in the shorts. The market cannot expand indefinitely.
Put another way: if each distributor recruits another 6 distributors - not an unreasonable target, one might think - and each of those 6 recruits another 6, and so on, one might be persuaded that this is realistic and could be sustained indefinitely. Or at least for a modest 13 generations, right? But after 13 generations the network has 13 billion distributors. That's almost twice the population of the planet.
Forever Living is a pyramid scheme. McDonald's isn't.