See: Uber, Subway franchises, academia, Amazon truck drivers, or any of your classic MLMs
Counterfactual: franchises.
There was a segment on John Oliver's program about Subway being particularly predatory about this, as well as deliberately maintaining information asymmetry to mislead franchisees.
In which sense do you think franchises are counterfactual here?
Plenty of franchises have sustainably made money for the franchiser and the bulk of their franchisees. That stands in stark relief to the history of MLMs.
I think of the airlines and rewards programs, google identifying people, and silicon valley startups selling stock.
If your research into the Subway franchise indicates otherwise, I'm all eager to hear the counterfactuals.
That's not really the point. I'm not disputing the correctness, I'm saying your argument is flawed. Imagine I told you "the sky is blue, my cat told me so". Well sure, the sky is in fact blue, but that doesn't make my cat a good source of information. A comedian, even one playing as a social crusader, is not a source, much like my cat is not.
> If your research into the Subway franchise indicates otherwise, I'm all eager to hear the counterfactuals.
Do you mean counterarguments? Counterfactuals are things that didn't happen or are not true, not a response to an assertion.
I think we just have a different approach to communication. If you told me "the sky is blue, my cat told me so", I would probably just verify the color of the sky and completely disregard the 2nd portion.
And no, that doesn't make your response flawed, because it mentioned a cat. It just makes it padded with irrelevant information. Part of comprehension is filtering irrelevant stuff like that from text in order to arrive at distilled facts that can be checked or verified through an experiment.
Same way that my mentioning John Oliver doesn't really impact the weight of my arguments, since the facts within accurately reflect reality. It was just an irrelevant padding for context, not something that was supposed to give extra weight to my arguments.
Does that make sense?
I also feel the need to acknowledge that I'm slightly entertained to be conversing with "antisthenes" under the handle "seneca".
Information or power asymmetry is the problem. Sometimes it’s the other way around. E.g. a large retailer selling a small company’s products.
That first sentence was important context for the second.
1 person has limited time. They can be doing it themselves and still sell you the rights to do it too. It would be pure coincidence if the market demand fit exactly into 1 persons ability to supply it. I say 1, but this is not limited to 1 person.
Selling information is a valid transaction. It requires much less time, and the price is justified by a similar idealogy to having trade secrets. Yes I could pursue this list of 100 potentials and convert 5% of them for 50k over the next couple months OR I can sell it to someone else for 2k and do something else with my time.
If selling information is an established type of sale, then it follows that at a large enough scale of demand, someone can specialize in that sale rather than acting on the relevant information at all. And now AGAIN it would be pure coincidence if that 1 person specializing in selling only information is exactly meeting the demand for such activity. So they accept money to train others on how to sell information.
Hence the entire data broker industry.
The problem is that even though this truth exists, the trust involved is easily abusable. I don't think I need to explain how.
It isn't a pyramid scheme, but it can very easily become a saturated market where late comers end up getting no value back since there still is a very real limit on demand. But it is not good for sales for the people training others in the sale of information to acknowledge that limit, so it ultimately leads to people effectively getting scammed even without anyone explicitly trying to scam anyone.
>The materials touted that he could make more than $75,000 and perhaps as much as $300,000 every year. The application required that you have $10,000 in startup capital, but the ad he saw also said that the fee might be waived for veterans.
>Aside from Ramos, all of the business owners and drivers interviewed for this piece see themselves as working primarily for Amazon, not for an independent small business. That mentality has added to the disappointment for workers seeking autonomy
>“It’s not a partnership. This is working for Amazon,” the veteran said. “We DSPs are not business owners, we’re paid managers. They control every aspect.”
>After the DSP owner is paid by Amazon, the owner then has to pay the drivers, taxes, leases on the vans, repairs to the vans, new clothing (the physicality of the job means some drivers go through gear every couple of weeks), worker’s comp and other costs.
https://www.protocol.com/workplace/amazon-delivery-program-t...
The contractor manages the delivery schedule and logistics. The contractor purchases their own vehicles rather than leasing them from FedEx. They're paid per route and per package rather than based on a ratings model.
Furthermore, FedEx pay for brand placement on vehicles and for branded uniforms.
This is a much more equitable system: both FedEx and the contractor have skin in the game. The contractor company aren't vassals to the corporation: they own their trucks and can sell their routes and contract to another business if they'd like.
These are weird comparisons. In some cases, the individual is the sales function, in some cases its the supply function, in other cases its a full blown SBU.
I don't think you can bucket all of these into MLM, because, well, some of them have nothing to do with marketing (ya know, the M part of MLM).
If it were MLM, your local neighborhood Subway would by trying to sell you a franchise (instead of a sandwich)
Maybe we need a new term for these types of businesses. "Contract Predators" sounds about right. Maybe "Risk Pushers."
They do not provide any net value to the society, all they do is shift the risk onto the franchisee with a pretty much unilateral contract. You have to engage in whatever shit they come up with, like buying expensive equipment. (McDonald's pizza anyone?)
The only instances where a franchise makes sense is when a franchisee could realistically walk away from the contract and stay in the business somehow.
https://www.eposnow.com/us/resources/how-much-do-franchise-o...
He’s still doing well but it wasn’t a dominos kinda thing.