Multi-level marketing: The 100-year-old scam that keeps on scamming

The long and predatory history of the American pyramid scheme

“Of course, I’m concerned about profits and losses. I just don’t give them top priority. That’s why I say, “P&L means people and love.” — Mary Kay Ash

I love a good multi-level-marketing takedown, and this book delivered the goods. Read has done extensive research on the birth, evolution, and pervasive reach of pyramid schemes in America, tracing scams like Amway, Herbalife and Mary Kay all the way back to their insidiously scammy foundings.

What’s fascinating is not just how these companies continually reinvent themselves, shape-shifting under new labels and sales hooks depending on the zeitgeist, but just how far the MLM tentacles spread — all the way down to the poorest of the poor who buy $100 starter kits with credit cards, and all the way up to American presidents (Reagan, Trump). The founding families of the largest American MLM schemes are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and their influence runs deep.

This is what this book does best: reveal that MLM schemes are in fact not “one of our many freaky sideshows, falling somewhere between a cult, a crime, and a joke. Something to gawk at, or ignore” but rather an active participant in shaping American culture and politics. MLMs have shaped the modern conservative movement, convinced people that government regulation would turn them into slaves, and that unbridled capitalism was the only way forward. Just as it has, millions of times, convinced everyday people to spend what little they have (and even what they don’t have) on something almost guaranteed not to generate a return, it has also undoubtedly swayed voters towards voting against their own interests under the guise of ‘freedom’.

The irresistible pull of the MLM dream — freedom, autonomy, abundance — is so closely tied with the American dream and spirit that it may never lose its appeal. In an age of unchecked misinformation, as long as the country is run by leaders who fear long-overdue regulation, they will no doubt continue to flourish. On the rise of MLMs in the late 20th Century, Read writes: “Eventually it could be found all over the world — anywhere the American Dream needs a public relations boost — which is still needed, always, in America too.”