I wasn’t surprised to find my inbox full of anger this morning. I knew mentioning anything about multi level marketing was gonna incite controversy. I was prepared.

But I felt like my remarks needed elaborating. Not apologetically, mind you. I have nothing good to say about pyramid schemes. However, I did want to explain why this is such a wasteful industry to get into. I want to help you guys avoid what so many people who just want to make money fall prey to.

Anything that you put money into needs to be an investment of some sort. And investing is for people who can afford to give up that money in the first place. So the fact that you are putting money you need into another person’s pocket up front is a little alarming. It benefits them immediately and then, they come at you with the promise that you will make that money back and then some. And it’s never like a normal “You can definitely pay your mortgage doing this” kind of promise either. They flat out tell you you’ll become a millionaire. This alone should make people cautious from the get-go but somehow it doesn’t.

So once you’ve added this money into the pyramid – that’s where it’s going, I promised you no bullshit – it goes to a higher up person. And then, since they got money that means the people above them get money too. And so on and so forth, as night follows the day. What’s not happening though, is a downward movement of money. So what ya gotta do is throw some people under you on the pyramid and that’ll put cash in your pocket. And since you need the money (’cause you just paid out a big chunk of yours), you start trying to add folks to your “down line” like air force recruiters at a fucking strip mall. And that’s how come Facebook is a cesspool of young moms trying to rope their friends list into MLM. They were broke, made themselves even more broke and now in order to get that money back, have to find more flunkies. The worst part is they will tell you the whole time that you are starting your own business. You are not. Some other guy started this business already. You’re just giving him more money.

I know because I once was you. My business of choice was selling sex toys. Oh boy, it was perfect. I mean how unique! It was an immediate conversation-starter.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I sell vibrators. It’s great.”

I thought it was an incredible way to make money. And it fit my personality too. I was no one’s Tupperware Lady! I was eccentric, dammit. I would save the world one lube tube at a time.

Also, I was a broke college student with a 4 year old to feed. So, I got sucked in. And hard.

I had a couple thousand dollars left over after my pell grants paid my tuition for the semester. What you are supposed to do with that money is live off of it. Buy food, school supplies, etc. But I was living with my partner at the time in her house off campus. I didn’t have any rent to pay so I figured what the hell? I can ‘start a business’.

So I did some research and chose the best reviewed sex toy business and signed up. Now, that business has since shut down, but at the time it stood out as being new and different from the other “romance party” gigs. It was more risque (fml).

Upon sign-up, you are assigned a mentor. This is the person that is set to profit off of whatever you buy (“inventory”) and sell to other people. But in the moment, this person is your biggest cheerleader. They guide you through the whole process including which package to start out with. For this company, there were three. I could pay $40 up front and get a variety of toys for inventory, or $65 or $150 and so on. So I chose the largest package they offered. It was a literal duffel bag full of sex toys, ya’ll. I still cringe just thinking about it. The bag had wheels and shit. Good god, what was I thinking.

Anyway, once I bought enough vibrators to start a car, my mentor lady became my best friend. She started blowing up my Facebook timeline (don’t remember adding her, by the way) about how many sales I had made and how great I was doing, bleh bleh bleh. I knew she was lying (I had yet to sell a thing) and she knew that she was lying. But integrity is not the name of the game. Illusion is. She wanted to give the illusion to all of my FB friends and all of hers as well that we, as a team, were just fucking killing it. Every day it was the same shit: her putting my accomplishments on blast on social media and me accomplishing nothing. It was bizarre as all fuck. But I went right along with it. I could see what she was doing and thought it was only to benefit me.

So about four days after I put in the order for my inventory, it arrives. I unzip my giant bag of goodies and begin to unwrap what I saw as my business itself. This was my store, my homework, my income and I had work to do. I placed everything in the floor of our living room, sorting it, inspecting it and checking it off my order list like the goddamn professional that I was. It was official: I sold sex toys and sex toy accessories.

It was around that time that we (the ‘we’ here is my ‘team’ they assigned me to, by the way; you get like a cluster of newbies, supervisors, boss ladies and then diamond level ladies all together and call it a ‘team’, see) had our first conference call. It was the diamond seller lady and all the peasantry on the phone at once. I want to interject here that I am a relatively quiet person in real life. I’m very reserved until I get to know someone. I don’t know if you’ve ever personally experienced the sound of about 30 women all trying to speak at once but I don’t wish it on my enemies. I got nauseous and had to put down my phone until I knew it was safe to listen again.

Once it calmed down we got to hear the diamond lady talk. She went into marketing tactics right out of the gate. According to her, grocery stores were great networking places. We should give out our business cards to everyone, family and friends as well as total strangers. Leave catalogs in gas station restrooms, put our card in suggestion boxes, when we leave a tip at restaurants, and on and on it went.

She mentioned how she was really self conscious about the idea of selling sex toys at first. There was a chorus of mumbled agreements on the line. Then she recounted a story of how she was hired to do a party for a lady she didn’t know and when she walked in, it was a group of women from her church. This was followed by the sound of dozens of them cackling on the phone. I was gettin’ a migraine.

After giving us a nice ‘training’ session in salesmanship, she started talking about the rewards of being a top seller. Ain’t gonna lie, I tuned out a lot during this part. But I do remember her telling the lot of us about a lady who sold so many vibrators, the CEO bought her a car. Lots of gasps and exclamations then.

I hung up feeling pretty apathetic. Not about the business necessarily, just about my team. I didn’t want to be on a team in the first place. So it was kind of a nuisance. But I told myself that I was doing this for me. Not them.

I managed to book a few parties (the lifeblood of these things) in the next few weeks. And made a few sales. I was in my mid 20s then and most of my friends were my targets, bless their hearts. And with each and every sale, I would feel that much more pumped about my new venture. The profits were shit but I had already tricked myself into believing that I had made the right choice. I mean no one wants to admit to themselves that they fucked up.

Eventually, I started to realize I wasn’t making the money I thought I would though. I made about $4 off of each transaction. At two products a week, this was depressing. So my solution was to look into wholesale distributors instead of buying my inventory from my business. So it would be like if someone went to a wholesale cookware source and paid half price for their inventory instead of buying directly from Tupperware. Logically, this was a swell idea. But there again, I was still spending money while not making any. So it didn’t matter where I got the products from. It only mattered that I couldn’t sell the damned things. I started to slowly feel like maybe I should get rid of the inventory I had and then be done with it altogether.

I continued to do the parties and the FB posts and the conference calls in the meantime. They surround you with ‘yes’ people. So you constantly feel like every choice you make is the right one. But even this started to make me weary. I was disappointed and it was getting harder and harder to shake the gut feeling that I had made a mistake.

But my turning point – and it was a weird one – was when I was demonstrating what I can only describe as the world’s strongest vibrator. We called them magic wands. There are tons of brands that have their own designs of these now. But back then there was Hitachi (fucking awesome by the way) and the knock offs. And wouldn’t you know it, we sold the knock offs.

We were supposed to act really excited about anything new that came along in our catalog. So there I was, mid-demonstration, feigning my best happy face, acting like this was the next big thing in the bedroom when I picked up the rather large “back massager” and plugged it in. Then, I made the mistake of switching this thing on and, y’all, the fucking lights flickered. Now, most of our products had a pleasant hum to them when they were cut on. This demonic contraption sounded like a dwarf’s jackhammer. It scared the hell out of me. And the party-goers could see it on my face. It betrayed what I can only assume looked like pure horror as I looked down at this arm-sized “toy” and glanced back up at the lights, uncertain if I should phone a priest. For fuck’s sake, who would want that anywhere near their tiger lily? Oddly enough, it was this moment that I knew this wasn’t my gig anymore. If I couldn’t genuinely promote a product like that, I wasn’t in the right business.

Later that night, I assessed the damage by going over how much I had spent compared to how much I had made. And that was when it clicked just how much I had fucked myself over. I spent about $300 total on inventory. And I had made about $32 profit. I made myself the promise then to never look back. Fuck that noise.

And now, that shit is just…everywhere. Maybe it’s just social media but I’ve never seen this many people wrapped up in MLM before. It’s astounding.

I don’t hold any ill will towards anyone that decides to get into MLM. But I want you to ask yourself about the moment when you are telling someone about your new business venture and you have that tug of hesitation. It’s not quite embarrassment but it’s pretty damn close. It’s the feeling you get when the person you are pitching to starts to ask you more and more questions. If you had something legit going on, you would never once get that feeling. It’s the instinct that something isn’t quite right but you don’t want to admit it to yourself just yet. And by the time you do, you’re in too deep.

– Broke