The Truth about Multi-Level Marketing Is Becoming More Marketable than its Big Lie.
Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by journalist Bridget Read is a breakthrough new book on the tragic and pervasive experience of America with multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM refers to enterprises such as Amway, Herbalife and Mary Kay, and a thousand other clones, enrolling 18 million Americans annually and vastly more globally. As the title indicates, and the text painstakingly documents, MLM’s utopian “income opportunity” is only a pyramid scheme. 99% of all participants lose money every year. 50% and more quit annually, only to be replaced by new hopefuls who face the same fate.
The book’s main significance is not its meticulously organized facts or history of MLM, nearly all of which were documented and publicized by others years before. The breakthrough is that these revelations are from an established, New York-based journalist and a major publisher, Penguin Random House. For 40 years, no serious books on multi-level marketing were issued by major publishers in America even as virtually every American household was harmed.
Bridget Read expands analysis and lifts MLM from media marginalization. She positions it centrally as an urgent bellwether of current American capitalism, exhibiting a grotesque new version of "economics." MLM’s brutal “asset extraction” occurs right in the home – family savings, credit, trusting relationships, talents, time and lifelong hopes. Its favored demographic is the financially distressed, a rapidly growing segment. Selling a scam of “self-employment,” MLM produces millions of “little bosses,” guilefully directed to recruit their own friends and family into the trap.
Remarkably, Little Bosses follows another book that exposes MLM, also from a credentialed journalist and major publisher, Cults Like Us, Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden. Both books cite my books, Ponzinomics and False Profits; I am personally quoted in each of the new books.
Borden’s book focuses on MLM’s cult ideology of “you will see it (MLM’s false income promises) when you believe it,” a mind-numbing subversion of critical thinking. Little Bosses Everywhere concentrates on MLM’s pyramid proposition. Journalist Bridget Read offers a vivid portrait of how MLM dupes millions, one vulnerable victim at a time.
Read also indulgently allowed for the view, more a false hope, that despite devastating losses and mountains of deceptive practice, maybe, just maybe, MLM might be a modern outgrowth of the old direct selling model and not, a devious scam disguised as direct selling.
In Ponzinomics, I showed how the invention of MLM was a complete and total break from direct selling. The first MLM, Nutrilite, spun off its clone, Amway, and then many other MLM clones spun off from Amway, creating today’s global network of MLMs. Meanwhile, real direct selling went virtually extinct decades ago.
To properly define and accurately position the MLM phenomenon, Bridget Read wanted to historically document that all MLMs share the same pyramid parentage of Nutrilite, the Adam of MLM. She focused research on how Mary Kay, one of the largest and oldest of MLMs, developed as a replica of Nutrilite, yet there was no documented connection of Mary Kay to the Nutrilite/Amway genealogy. Read’s dogged research removes this last straw from those resisting the terrible truth. She documents that when Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay, launched that business in 1963 she was assisted by her husband, who happened to be a national field director for the MLM, Nutri-Bio, a huge MLM of that time with direct connection to Nutrilite.
So, why was this important information about MLM – its reality – not addressed by publishers during the last 40 years? Why, instead, were absurd accounts published about MLM as the vanguard of grass roots capitalism and standard bearer of the American Dream?
From my perspective, it is not a government-run Ministry of Truth. Rather, it is market-based censorship, a system even more effective than what George Orwell described. Market-based censorship is the policy of major publishers that certain authors or subjects shall not be published when the publishers – just 5 now control 80% of the market ¬ decide those authors or subjects won’t make them enough profit. MLM’s brutal pillage of Main Street, under the nose of federal regulators, was classified as unprofitable. MLM’s Big Lie stories about “success” and “direct selling” were deemed marketable. Publishers didn’t deliberately suppress the truth and spread false narratives. They just responded to “the market.” Big Brother wears a salesman’s smile.
The publishing of Bridget Read’s book, along with others recently published, therefore, reflect a portentous new development for MLM and a propitious one for Main Street: the Truth about MLM is becoming more marketable than its Big Lie.
Robert FitzPatrick (copyright 2025)
Not just millions of people have been sucked into MLM scams, but hundreds of millions. Why on Earth isn't this headline news?
ReplyDeleteAs was proved by Bernie Madoff, the best way to hide a fraud, is to make it as big as you possibly can.
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