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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

When I worked retail sales in the 90s there was an Amway cult meeting nearby. Every few weeks, they would drop in after a pep-rally type thing and try to waste your time looking at the most expensive thing and talk about their amazing business. Then they'd drop the pitch (at the time it was about their e-commerce business).

Once you ran into them, you could spot them. It was a mix of desperate mid-life crisis guys looking for cash, clean-cut naive younger people, and diligent moms starting a business. Really sad.

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Cult is the right word for it. I went to a meeting once, met the leader, and it was fascinating. I caught every bit of the psychological warfare in play.

Shortly after, I realized an important fact about MLMs, or at least Amway:

They encourage members to work harder at their real jobs (their plan A) in order to finance what they call the member's plan B (independent business, early retirement, wealth, etc). This results in a siphoning of capital from the legitimate economy to the pyramid organization, producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process.

What's missing from most pyramid scheme diagrams, including the one in this article, are the arrows pointing from the legitimate economy (value adding corporations that the members work for as well) through the member, and then up the pyramid to the top.

Viewed through this lens, it's obvious that MLMs function as parasites, like a tick on a cow.

> producing mind numbing amounts of physical waste in the process.

It's hard not to see bitcoin like this, with the huge energy waste and the newly brought in funds from ad-hoc meme advertising on social media going to early investors.

MLMs / Pyramid Schemes and bitcoin are fundamentally different constructs.

But fundamentally the same result

Decentralized ledger technology and the notion of value are different from manipulative pyramid corporations.

Fun Fact: the current secretary of education is a multi-billionaire because her family runs Amway.

Sure pays to be at the top of that pyramid.

"Fun" is not the adjective that leaps first to my mind to describe this fact.

And her brother founded Blackwater Security. He tried to broker a backchannel with Russia after the election (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black...)

To be more accurate, she was already rich due to automotive patents and a company her dad ran.

She married into the Amway stuff through choice rather than growing up in it. Which is in many ways worse.

> Once you ran into them, you could spot them. It was a mix of desperate mid-life crisis guys looking for cash, clean-cut naive younger people, and diligent moms starting a business.

That's really heartbreaking to hear. Usually MLMs sell to types that "really need to make money", when in fact it brings people further away from that.

A friend of mine (almost) fell for a cryptocurrency 'class' that "teaches" people about this "exciting new wealth-building opportunity". But it's instead trying to sell shitcoins.

I remember working retail in 98-99 and an older couple came in. They starting to talk to me about starting an internet business and I was interested as I didn't know any better and the web was all the rage at the time. They came to my parents house and it was basically a version of Amazon Subscribe and Save where they would send you items on a monthly schedule. It sounds like the same e-commerce business idea you encountered.

That was the same pitch I got, you triggered the memory space in my brain. The company was Quixstar, which is/was the Amway online of that era.

>It was a mix of desperate mid-life crisis guys looking for cash, clean-cut naive younger people, and diligent moms starting a business.

Something struck me as a bit familiar about those descriptions. And then I remembered, around here, it matches up with the demographics of the gig economy types. Uber, food delivery, etc. Only difference being the gig economy types are drawn more from the poor. I wonder if the desperate who are poor do gig economy jobs, whereas the desperate who are middle or upper middle class, (or those who like to think of themselves as middle class culturally anyway), tend to go for the "start a business" MLM thing?

> the desperate who are middle or upper middle class

I find they tend to do both. The poor won't have the capital nor credit to be an Uber driver. The middle class will engage in both. I've had my share of Uber/Lyft drivers also hawking Herbalife.

Uber is all of the above. Some people are middle class folks selling car depreciation at a loss. As rates drop there are fewer of these folks.

A lot of these guys now are subcontractors in my area. Drivers frequently don’t match the picture and the standards for the cars drop. My final Uber ride was a male driver (expecting a female) in a 2006/7 Odyessy that was beat to shit.

I used to do work in systems for motor carrier regulation and its likely that the car and driver were unsuitable for passenger service. I had to get to the airport, but I deleted the app immediately afterwards.

You have to have a job and at least some cash to do MLM.

Gig jobs are basically the equivalent of day labor. The people doing Uber gigs would be digging ditches or humping things around years ago.

I used to gets people of the same ethnicity as me befriend me at the mall and elsewhere. Usually they would call me a week later and chitchat before dropping their pitch about whatever MLM business they running. I got used to it and started string them along and waste their time.

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