Let's talk about multi-level marketing.
I know you probably flinched when I said that.
You've likely gotten Facebook messages from someone
you had one class with in high school who
reaches out like hey, Slammy Sammy,
you look older since we last spoke.
You want to buy some creams?
They've changed my life.
#GIRLBOSS, #POSITIVITY, #SIDEHUSTLE.
I married a cop!
As much as you may hate those messages,
the women sending them probably hate them more.
They're ensnared in the growing industry
of multi-level marketing or MLMs,
which mostly target women.
It's a thriving industry run by some of our finest pieces
of shit.
REPORTER: Daily Beast reports today on the vitamin selling
venture launched in 2009 by a company
called The Trump Network.
It was a multi-level marketing scheme along the lines
of Amway or Mary Kay.
The scheme pedaled a number of diet products and sham
nutritional supplements, including
a supposedly customized vitamin regime requiring users
to send in a urine sample.
On the bright side, he gave you a discount if you
delivered your urine in person.
Now what are MLMs?
I'll tell you what they're not--
pyramid schemes because those are illegal.
Here's how multi-level marketing works.
At the top of our company, we have a person selling
say protein shakes for dogs.
We'll call them P.
P makes money by selling Skinny Bitch shakes,
but also by recruiting new salespeople.
Let's call them Y, R, and A. P makes money off
of everything they sell and also off everything
their recruits sell.
And they can make money off people they recruit.
Oh my god.
What a coincidental arrangement of letters.
There are tons of multi-level marketing
schemes in the United States.
There's LulaRoe, which sells clothing, most famously
leggings that look like they were made
by Lisa Frank's blind sister.
There's Visalus, which is not dick pills,
but fitness shakes and powders, which spiritually speaking
are still dick pills.
And there's my personal favorite, Vantel Pearls.
Vantel sells cheap ass pearls for much more than they're
worth in online pearl parties just
like this one, which is actually from a different seller.
But I'm going to show it to you anyway because it is amazing.
Hello again, pearlies.
Today, I am going to be shucking a hot pink pearl.
Absolutely gorgeous.
This is a juicy oyster.
Here it is.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh yeah.
Find my big, pink pearl.
Just poke around in it a little bit.
Mmm.
I could watch you shuck all day.
Seriously, it is great that this lady isn't stuck in Vantel.
But if she isn't, why does she have to give
creepy hand jobs to oysters?
MLM companies are thriving.
According to the multi-level marketing industry's trade
organization, the Direct Selling Association, the number
of Americans in MLMs rose from 15.6 million to 20.5 million
between 2011 and 2016.
And 3/4 of those were women.
And it's not because women have a burning passion
for waterproof lipstick.
MLMs are growing at a time when women's options are shrinking.
Over the past three decades, the cost of childcare
has spiked to unaffordable levels.
And since the US also doesn't have anything resembling paid
family leave, many women with kids
are forced to drop out of the workplace.
There are actually fewer mothers in the workplace
now than in the late '90s.
How is it worse for women now than in the '90s?
Back then, our national pastime was writing
articles about whether or not famous children
were still virgins.
MLMs prey on this predicament.
They promise you can make your own hours, work from home,
and be lifted by a group of fellow ambitious women.
It's like the sisterhood of the life-ruining pants.
But while MLM companies are making money hand over fist,
the participants are not.
99% of people who join MLM companies actually lose money.
And the 1% who do profit do so by recruiting new members
and collecting commissions from them
before they ultimately give up.
Companies like LulaRoe require an especially steep buy-in.
A typical new recruit might purchase thousands of dollars
in merchandise, which they do not get to select themselves.
Some might be cute and easy to sell.
But no one in the fucking world wants
to wear leggings that feature a bee crawling up your cooch.
Oh my god, that bee is going to sting your big pink pearl.
Then they're stuck with 100 pairs of ugly ass
bee cunnilingus leggings that--
and this is true-- even LulaRoe says you can't wear as pants.
Fuck you, LulaRoe.
I just spent my kid's college fund on leggings.
I am wearing them as pants, a cape, oven mitts.
And I would probably even be buried in them.
And sometimes, the products aren't just ugly.
You would open the boxes, and it would smell like old food.
And some of it would come in.
And you would open the packages.
And it would be wet.
I reached up to my up line on our team page.
And I said, hey, I got these leggings.
And they're soaking wet.
Has anybody else got soaking wet leggings?
This is really weird.
They smell like mildew.
Perhaps like the pearls, the leggings were
also harvested from the sea.
But the founders of LulaRoe swear up and down that it
is not a pyramid scheme.
What that is it is an uneducated opinion.
They haven't looked at who we are because we sell
product through to a consumer.
And it's highly desirable product.
That is not a pyramid scheme.
Yes, who wouldn't highly desire products like these?
[LAUGHTER]
Stidham's claim is a little shaky though.
The FTC says one of the--
I'm sorry.
They're ridiculous.
The FTC says one of the hallmarks of an illegal pyramid
scheme is a promise that sellers will
make money from recruiting others rather
than selling the product.
According to former high level seller Courtney Harwood,
LulaRoe was all about recruiting.
They really pushed recruiting, not so much sales at all.
Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting.
I mean, if it's a warm body, take them.
If it's a warm body, take them,
sounds less like a good business practice
and more like John Mayer's personal philosophy.
The women who sell for MLMs work incredibly
hard just to stay afloat.
But they'd probably be more successful if they
started their own businesses.
About 39% of small businesses earn
a profit over their lifetime versus less than 1% of MLMs.
The success rate is so low, even gambling
is a safer bet than trying to sell MLM products.
And they are destroying women's finances.
REPORTER: So Konczal said she invested around $11,000,
but despite working more than full-time hours,
couldn't make it work, and in November said she
was still over $4,000 in debt.
REPORTER: Allie says she got into 10,000 pounds worth of
credit card debt in two years.
Racks of clothes and piles of leggings
are taking over Kimberly Jarrett's house.
We're in my living room.
And this is approximately, I would say,
about 550 pieces of LulaRoe.
That is horrible.
But maybe she can recycle them into something useful,
like I did with my Beanie Baby husband.
MLMs are the most despicable form of corporate feminism.
They use their "you go, girl" branding
to trap capable, ambitious women in a worsening cycle of debt.
If MLM founders actually believed in empowering women,
they wouldn't scam them out of their life savings,
especially if all they get back is
leggings that make it look like you've
been bad touched by a bee.
We'll be right back.
[APPLAUSE]
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