Last week the Salt Lake Tribune published a fantastic article about the reality in multi-level marketing, entitled Utah Juice Companies Offer Few Prospects. MLMs like Mary Kay, Amway, MonaVie, and Herbalife have been claiming that the great recession has increased the number of distributors because people are looking for ways to make money during this time of high unemployment. The problem with this claim is that while more people are signing up for these bogus business opportunities, almost no one is actually profiting from their activities.
Multilevel marketing companies like to refer to themselves as “direct sales” companies. They want to keep the focus off recruiting and onto selling of the products directly to customers. The problem is that little actual retail sales occur for a number of reasons: