S1 E6: How a Dream Becomes a Nightmare

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Previously, on the dream.

Growing up, I always knew that I wanted to be a leader.

As a young child, I used to say I wanted to be the first woman president.

We have a ladder, obviously, like most truck sales companies have.

It is not a pyramid.

I always like pointing in.

There's no pyramid scheme.

Those are illegal.

I would never be part of that.

Hello, hello.

Look at you, little New Yorker.

My gosh.

How the heck are you?

I'm a people person, so I love the home party.

That's what fills my cup.

I'm a stay-at-home mom, sometimes left with

lots of free time, and I have gotten the opportunity.

How much does it cost to have a party?

Absolutely nothing.

The only thing that you're ever out would be snacks and drinks.

Now, what do you have to lose, right?

For me, without 31, we would not be, we'd still be living in a trailer park.

We have a bathtub with a drain open and the water is forever flowing and going out that drain.

You have to be constantly bringing people in because they're going to leave.

This will come as a surprise to exactly no one, but Danielle, that ACE recruiter and distributor of 31 we profiled last week, her success is unusual in the world of MLMs.

First, the company itself sells a product that's attractive and useful.

And though some of the items are a bit pricey, the business model is loaded with prizes and hostess gifts and clearance events.

And so when those things work, they kind of balance the costs.

Also, Danielle lives in an area where, according to the people in her downline and my experience living there, you don't need a huge income to have a good life.

And then there's the obvious reason she's an outlier.

She got into her MLM a long time ago, so now a huge portion of people who sell 31 in Michigan are in her downline.

She's almost at the top of the ladder.

Not many people get up as high as Danielle in any MLM.

And yet, with all she has working in her favor, including 170 distributors directly under her, she still only makes $42,000 a year.

A fine salary.

But where are all the yachts and mansions and Lamborghinis, you know?

I thought they were supposed to be Lamborghinis.

Anyway, so Danielle's a rarity.

What's much more typical is making little to no money, or worse, going into debt and direct sales.

People aren't generally super cool standing up in front of their friends and family to say, I got swindled and maxed out my credit cards on diet shakes.

It's humiliating, but they will tell the internet.

Just hunt for the going out of business sales on Facebook.

They're so popular, they have an acronym, goob.

Hello, ladies.

Hi, guys.

Hi.

So, what are we doing today?

We have a goob sale.

Yes, I am.

I'm going out of business.

This is an Agnes of Dora going out of business sale.

Everything is 50% off, 5-0.

So, today, you guys, I need to get rid of all this Lula in this bus.

Please help me.

We have tons of stuff.

Yeah, still have lots of stuff.

I am doing wholesale from now until I am down to my last few pieces.

So

if you are interested in getting...

Yes, sweetheart.

Okay, so please, please, please, you guys, help me out.

I just can't do all these businesses and

I told everybody I would explain.

Oh, look at my hair.

I've been mowing today.

Still upbeat, but how depressing.

And then there are anti-MLM groups on Facebook and Tumblr's you can follow and message boards.

Some of the best stories are on Reddit.

Take this one.

They write, when my siblings and I were young, my parents got recruited into Amway.

My dad had just been diagnosed with MS.

They bought boxes and boxes of products, cassettes, and went to hype conferences.

Tons of debt later, they finally stopped.

For 10 years, they poured money and more tragically, hope, into the idea that they could provide for themselves as my dad's illness inevitably got worse.

Or this one.

I need some guidance.

I made an investment, let's say roughly $15,000 over a year ago in a direct sales business.

I now have a ton of products sitting in my house and half of our debt is on this credit card.

I'm not sure how to come up with the extra money other than get a second day job.

Now that I say that, I'm thinking I need to stay in the business as my second job.

Help!

And so on.

What on earth is going on here?

How are there so many people who not only fail at MLMs, but go into debt trying to make money with one?

And why isn't this the dominant story?

Today we'll hear from someone who lost big time in an MLM and who took a while to be able to admit that to anyone.

And we'll speak to an expert about why we collectively just refuse to accept the truth about this industry.

I'm Jane Marie and this is The Dream, Episode 6: How a Dream Becomes a Nightmare.

It took us a while to find someone who studies these behaviors, but we did.

Introducing Stacey Bosley, an associate professor of economics at Hamlin University.

And I've been studying this industry, multi-level marketing, and the associated issue of pyramid schemes for about eight years or so.

What got you interested?

I saw significant losses among people that I knew well as they moved from one opportunity to another.

This was in the 1990s when

people really believed that there was some secret sauce that they were missing out on.

And it's also this area is a really strong subculture that sort of runs under the radar of a lot of people, especially a lot of formal academics.

So it was a really untouched area for study.

We're finding that to be true.

And it's really frustrating because it feels like it's such a huge, huge industry and like no one's looking at it.

No, it's so true.

There's, okay, there's, there's a couple of issues here.

One, there's a lack of data.

So economists don't want something that doesn't have data attached, right?

It makes it very difficult for them to do any kind of empirical analysis.

And so that's, that's a barrier.

I think another barrier is that there's a gendered element here to some degree, and that a lot of multi-level marketing is right is in the female realm.

And so there's, I think, you know, the field is,

at least speaking from an economist's perspective, the field is male-dominated.

And so it's just not on the radar.

Stacey says it's not just the lack of data or girliness that makes this an unpopular thing to study.

It's that it's really hard to categorize people who are involved in MLMs.

And you need to put people in categories in order to run experiments and do studies on them.

Are these people consumers?

Are they investors?

Are they laborers?

Are they entrepreneurs?

And the truth is, is they're all of the above.

One thing that makes MLMs so fascinating to Stacey is that question I had.

How are they not universally disliked at this point?

Where are the new recruits coming from?

I mean, this is something that requires a lot more study.

So, you know, I'm starting to do some experiments, some economic experiments that try to dig into, you know, when people see the same pitch, how do they react differently?

Right.

And there are people who react violently differently, right?

I mean, people who literally go run and scream and

really, you know,

well, for one, I mean, they worry about

mixing their social and economic lives, right?

Maybe they don't want to ask friends to buy stuff from them.

Right.

And others who fully embrace that.

There's, you know, there's people who see the recruiting element and immediately think pyramid scheme and go running, right?

And others who think that that, you know, they hear the words team building and entrepreneurship and that appeals appeals to them.

So, you know, part of it's how you process the rhetoric, how you process, you know, and what are your expectations going in and

are you okay with this kind of labor, right?

Those people who hear about these opportunities and say, yes, that's for me.

Like I said, when they get burned, they can feel really embarrassed that they ever felt that way.

We reached out to those folks from Reddit and YouTubers and the people on Facebook.

No one wanted to talk to me, which is completely understandable.

If I biffed super hard at direct sales, I wouldn't want to talk about it either, especially with a stranger.

But then a light.

Guess who went into debt selling Mary Kay?

The fill-in pastor at Danielle's church, Katie Hyde.

Katie started out in TV news.

If there was a snowstorm, they would put me out in the snowbank to tell people at home that it was indeed snowing.

Katie grew up in mid-Michigan and got her master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University, one of the best journalism programs.

Katie is super smart and ambitious, but daily news reporting is one of those all-consuming jobs.

You're up before dawn every day, trying to find a story, or you're up all night standing in a snowbank.

After a few years, Katie was over it.

She'd gotten married and wanted to spend time chasing her future kids around the house rather than chasing ambulances around the county.

And right around that time, an incredible opportunity fell in her lap.

My best friend was living out of state, and she called me because she had started Mary Kay

and I just happen to think that sounds fun.

I was her first recruit.

I signed up.

I interviewed with her director and liked it.

I could play with makeup and I really enjoyed selling.

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Katie is back in news these days as a radio reporter, but 16 years ago, she was hustling as a Mary Kay salesperson.

For those of you who don't know, Mary Kay is the makeup and skincare company that has those pink Cadillacs and a lot of other pink stuff.

Katie said that her experience selling Mary Kay turned her from one of those optimistic about MLM's people into one of the run-for-the-hills people in a matter of months.

I, of course, had gone to all the Mary Kay leadership meetings that they have, and they hosted those at that point in time once a week.

And I liked the idea of, hey, I could become a director.

I could have women working under me.

I would get a portion of their hard work, essentially, and I'd have a commission and I could work out of the house.

I could, when the time came to have my kids, I wouldn't have to put them in daycare.

I mean, this sounds wonderful.

And so I recruited eight eight people who really wanted to be part of my team.

You reach out to your aunts, you reach out to your grandmother, you reach out to these people that you think are soft targets that will do anything for you.

They might have some cash laying around.

You have to get them to buy the starter kit.

At that moment, it was $100 plus your shipping, plus your tax.

And then they had to order at least $600 worth of product.

And it was at that point, the recruiting and the building of the team that something just did not sit right with me.

Do you remember what that was?

It was the idea that

you were essentially bilking people out of their money.

In this area, I was encountering women that didn't even have bank accounts.

that had their credit cards shut off.

I didn't feel good squeezing them for every penny that they had or telling them it was okay just to buy their starter kit and then see what product they could sell.

And the big thing that they had, which this is not anything I felt good about at the time or promoted, but they had the husband unaware plan, which meant you go to a meeting, let's say, with your friend and you find out about this great Mary Kay opportunity and you want to buy the $100 starter pack, and then, ooh, maybe you want to do inventory.

Doesn't your husband want you to be successful?

Yeah, but I really need to check with him.

Oh, you can always ask for forgiveness later.

It was this manipulative thing.

And I don't know about anybody else's marriage, but I tell my husband things and he tells me his things.

And we have an equal stake in how we spend our money.

And if that's how it is in my marriage, I don't want to tell somebody else, oh, don't tell your husband.

Like, I'm driving a wedge in their marriage.

Like, there are huge implications involved there.

But this is what you're preaching in your company marketing tools like this is a well-known marketing ploy ignore your husband and just write this check to me it's wait it was called the husband unaware plan like in their unofficially but it was you couldn't go to a leadership meeting or a local meeting without hearing that It wasn't just these sales tactics that sketched her out.

There were also other job requirements.

For instance, quotas, the amount of product her team team needed to sell every month to keep earning a commission.

Now, every multi-level marketing company will tell you, there's no quotas, we don't require quotas.

And I don't care what word they use, they require quotas.

The problem came at the end of the month for me when I didn't meet that sales cap.

And back at that time, it was $4,000 a month from my production, which is buying the product from the company to sell to others.

It could be anybody within my unit unit that would buy products.

So $38 here, $400 here, whatever it was, then I would get that commission.

If I didn't get that $4,000,

then that was a problem.

I can't tell you the amount of hours I put in or the amount of uncomfortable phone calls I made to people.

toward the end of the month when things are winding down and we hadn't met our unit quota.

And hey, I noticed you hadn't placed an order in a while.

Do you think you could maybe put in $200 or $400?

if you know anything about me i'm like a type a overachiever like you don't set goals to fail you carry through and my big hang up was everybody knows i'm going for this what if i fail and you're you're hearing the mary kay like nobody fails well the reason nobody fails is because if there's a

lacking between what your unit has and what you need to become a director, you just plop it on your own personal credit card.

No one's going to say boo.

All you have to do is order product in your team members' names and have it shipped to your address or another address.

The company does not care if you sell the product.

They just care if you buy it.

They're not looking at your credit card statements.

They don't care if you can make ends meet at the end of the month.

They just care that you're ordering the minimum and that your team is at least doing the minimum and ordering that product.

So you could have 100 time-wise cleansers on your shelf.

They don't care if they ever wind up in the hands of customers.

All they know on their balance sheet at the end of the day that you ordered it and they got that profit and now we're moving on.

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So there Katie was ordering thousands of dollars of product on her personal credit card to satisfy her team quota.

This idea seems so nuts to me to actually take on debt.

your debt on your credit card in the names of people who are supposed to be making you money.

How could that ever feel like the right choice?

Stacey has part of the answer.

There are some things that I think are sort of universal behavioral frailties that we have as humans.

We have what we call honoring sunk costs.

You know, when we spend a lot of money on something and it's irreversible and we've done that, we've made that decision, we often follow that money with more money.

Honoring sunk costs is a very interesting economic theory that I'd like to dig into for a minute because it applies to what goes on in a lot of MLMs.

Sunk costs are money spent that can't be recouped, and a lot of studies and experiments have been done about how they affect our actions and outlook.

For example, in one study, people were asked to predict how well their horse would do at the racetrack.

One group was asked before they placed a bet and another group after they placed a bet.

The people who had already plunked down cash predicted their horses would do great, while those who hadn't yet spent money had more reasonable expectations.

So sunk costs can make some people feel more optimistic about making money at the same time that they're actually in the hole.

Another thing about sunk costs.

Sometimes they cause you to spend even more.

Take this example.

You've purchased a non-refundable plane ticket and hotel room in Vegas.

The day of the trip, you do not feel like going at all.

If you stay home, you're out the money you've spent, but you could spend your time doing something you want to be doing.

If you go on the trip, you spend your time doing something you don't want to be doing.

And you're spending more money because you're in Vegas.

Same applies to a non-refundable movie ticket.

Same applies to a wedding.

Once you've paid for a wedding, you got to get married, even if you've changed your mind.

So that's honoring sunk costs.

It's a logical fallacy, but we all do it.

So you're sending money on your credit card to make it look like your downline is keeping up so that you are you making enough back to make that expenditure worth it somehow or are you just spending the money to maintain your director status

You're spending the money to maintain your director status, or you're spending money to maintain your red jacket status or the car that you so desperately want to earn.

Because if I'm supposed to have a $4,000 quota and I'm at $2,000 and I'm really tired and no one's going to order, then I might as well just put $2,000 on my credit card, right?

Because I can sell it and I'm a good seller and it doesn't matter and I'll wake up feeling better tomorrow and that's what I'm going to do, right?

And then you feel good for 48 hours and then you realize, shoot, there's 28 days left in this month and I need to get another 4,000

for this month.

And it's the same scenario over and over and over again.

You hate being there, but you're not sure how to leave and you feel guilty if you do.

You've invested so much of your life and your identity.

And I think when it comes to Mary Kay or anything like that, people look at you and say, okay,

you're going to become a millionaire selling Scentsy.

Okay.

That people do have that natural inclination to look at you that way.

And you think, no, I'm going to prove them wrong.

And

then I didn't.

But I have so much invested.

I'm not really sure I can drop out of this.

It's just, you're conflicted.

Then there's this other theory, loss aversion.

Loss aversion says that we feel losses much more acutely than gains.

We really feel losses to such a level that, um, psychologically, that we seek to do things to avoid realizing the loss.

So, that you know, people stay with bad relationships, they stay with bad, a poor house investment, they stay with poor financial investments because they don't want to actually realize the loss.

And so long as it's ongoing, right?

I haven't actually pulled the trigger on finishing it out, then I don't have to realize that loss yet.

We hate to lose money so much that we do a lot of weird, counterintuitive things to avoid feeling like we've lost money, even while we're losing money.

And then there's this tendency we have to do what's called overweighting small probability events.

It's what happens when you buy a Powerball ticket.

Like, no, you are not going to win the lotto.

Or are you?

What were you hoping would happen?

As you're going into debt, as you're adding more and more onto your credit cards, like what was the long game?

I think you're hoping that you'll run into this woman at the supermarket that's really looking for the Mary Kay opportunity and she's going to order $5,000 of inventory, or you're going to do a party where you sell $500 worth of product in just one hour.

I mean, you're hoping for these big moments that they would speak about at these company events all the time.

But at the end of the day, people are just buying one lotion at a time.

I guess I hoped that it would turn around.

I would have my one big break and it would pay down this debt and then we would be fine.

There was such great relief that final month.

I was only a director for a couple months because I just, I failed miserably.

I had tapped out all of my people

and

didn't want to do it anymore.

And there was such great relief where they said, we're going to have to strip you of your director title.

And I'm like, woo, who?

Like, I just needed someone to do it for me.

How much debt were you in toward the end?

Do you know?

It wasn't 10,000, but it was thousands of dollars that I had spent on product and having product ordered under

team members' names and shipped to a different address.

And I paid for it.

So if you look at it, you're like, I didn't do anything illegal.

I didn't do anything dishonest, but I didn't do anything honestly.

Or smart in a business way, right?

Or smart or 100% ethical.

It just smells hanky.

Can we use that word?

It just,

and I

did not like being that person, but I knew that every meeting I went to, I'm like, you're doing this too, aren't you?

They had to.

In addition to those few bits of human nature that MLMs exploit, there's another big one that Katie finds particularly egregious.

And it's the same thing that true believers like Danielle love most about some of these businesses.

The other thing that is really tough about this company is they have their motto is God first, family second, career third, which if you listen to it, is so manipulative because you're using Jesus as your marketing ploy.

I don't think you ever use Jesus as your marketing ploy.

I don't think God sits up there and wants people to be successful at Mary Kay.

I think he has bigger plans than that for their lives.

It's just this disconnect between, okay, we're going to take God as our business partner and it has nothing to do with helping the world we live in.

It just has to deal with selling product and making your quota.

And that should rub everybody the wrong way.

It rubbed Morley Safer the wrong way, too, during his 1979 profile of Mary Kay herself for 60 Minutes.

Do you think that's really fair in terms of marketing to inject God into it as though there was some religious experience involved in either working for, buying, selling?

Let me say this.

I really feel that our company is where it is today and has been blessed beyond all belief by the fact that God is using our company as a vehicle to help women to become the beautiful creatures that he created.

But do you think in a sense you're using God?

I hope not.

I sincerely hope not.

I hope he's using me instead.

And then there's the problem of information.

I mean there is a lot of lack of transparency here.

Stacey says that in addition to preying on basic human frailties, MLMs have positioned their industry in such a way, legally, that they aren't required to do simple things that almost any other industry would have to do to survive.

For example, they don't have to disclose how much you can expect to make or lose.

How?

Well, first, they're almost all privately held, so that information is private.

And they don't have to follow franchise law, which would also require them to make these numbers public.

Because a business is only a franchise if you're required to spend more than $570 in the first six months to get started.

So all the MLMs keep their enrollment fees at $569 or less.

And even those companies that do choose to give an income disclosure statement, those are often somewhat misleading.

They leave out, for example, typically the percentage of people that made no check at all.

That just seems super shady.

We looked at a bunch of these income disclosure statements to see exactly what Stacey's talking about.

One MLM, Rodan and Fields, a skincare company, famously began releasing this info in a PR effort to seem more transparent.

It's a one-page document, which is already weird seeing as how other company literature, like their policies and procedures handbook or the compensation plan, are each the size of a novella.

At any rate, on this one sheet of paper about income, there's a paragraph at the top.

It's about empowerment, followed by another paragraph about earning fun money or perhaps more.

Halfway down the page, we get to some numbers, and they are bananas.

First, Rodan and Fields claims to have 400,000 enrolled distributors.

400,000 people trying to sell or buy at a discount lotion and soap.

For reference, there are fewer than 20,000 CVSs and Walgreens in America, aka lotion and soap stores, combined.

Back to those 400,000.

Of them, only about half received any commission check at all in 2017.

Of those, nearly 60% made an average of, wait for it,

$243

for the year.

Less than 1% made more than a beginning teacher's salary.

And going back to the roughly 175,000 folks who made nothing, there's no line showing how much they lost.

Those people are not represented in the, in an earnings table, for example.

They also don't

publish expenses.

So

you can say, well, they sold.

X amount at retail and 1% of them made a profit, but we don't, that's not what we're telling you.

We're not telling you what their profit was.

We're telling you how much money they gave us.

They're telling you revenue, right?

Yeah.

So again, they're sort of not allowing you to even to fully process your profit, right?

Because you're focused so much on the revenue side, which, you know,

I'm finding that it's hard for people to even see while they're in it, like how much money they're actually spending.

Like people aren't really that great about accounting.

Oh, my goodness.

Absolutely.

I mean,

and then I would say they're in some cases actively discouraged from doing so.

Not only are distributors not encouraged to keep good records, the companies themselves often purposefully avoid collecting information that any other business would deem crucial.

You know, if we think about what a traditional retail organization does, of course they want to know who's buying their product, right?

They want to know everything about who's buying their product because that allows them to do a better job as a retailer, right?

Right.

And so what is, you know, astonishing is and concerning is when firms actively fail to capture that information.

Because then it appears as though the actual ultimate user is irrelevant.

And this is one of the things that frustrates me is that sometimes I feel like people

who believe that network marketing, direct selling, multi-level marketing is sort of the way of the future or is like this amazing alternative approach to economics often suggest that the rules of economics economics just don't apply to them.

So it doesn't matter if it's a recession and nobody has any money.

This is a great time to be in multi-level marketing.

It doesn't matter what the prices are in GNC or Walmart or Amazon because our product is so different that you can't even imagine a comparable product.

Well, we know that's not true, right?

I mean, almost any product probably has a definable class of alternatives.

It doesn't matter

how many sellers sellers are in our area, right?

That somehow the sky's the limit on compensation, the sky's the limit on demand, right?

And so there's all these ways in which

the promises and the arguments around it suggest that they're infallible, right?

That they just don't have the same rules as the rest of the marketplace.

And the truth and the reality is that they do.

And

therefore, right, it's not going to work.

You know, sometimes these kinds of businesses are called, you know, turnkey businesses.

Literally, turn the key.

We've given you the key, right?

We've given you the vehicle.

And now

you drive it.

And if you go off the road, it's because

you didn't do it properly.

And then there's this other mantra, right?

That the only way to fail is to quit.

You might have heard that saying.

And that's really frustrating, right?

The sense that, you know, literally you will, success is guaranteed so long as you do not quit.

And they're always on the precipice of the next level, right?

I'm so close.

And, like you said, I need that jumpstart.

Maybe I'm going to go to an extra training to do that.

Maybe I'm going to buy some extra sales tools, samples.

And I'm always on the precipice of being profitable, you know, rising to the next level.

And so

I just have been given the keys.

I just need to not quit.

We reached out to Mary Kay and Rodan and Fields for comment.

No word yet from Mary Kay, but Rodan and Fields replied with an unsigned statement that came from the email address corporate pr atrodananfields.com.

In it, they asked us to clarify that they do not sell lotion or soap.

They sell, quote, prestige dermatologist-inspired skincare.

My bad.

When asked why they didn't structure their business as a franchise, they said it was to save their recruits money.

When asked to offer proof that end consumers and not just consultants are buying products, they said that orders are placed through a website and quote, thus consumers buy the vast majority of our products.

Like as if their consultants don't have access to their own websites.

And then unsurprisingly, they say that Rodan and Fields consultants are not paid for recruiting.

even though their compensation plan is all about how to earn promotions, higher commissions, and deeper discounts by recruiting.

Finally, they spent a paragraph speculating on how content and empowered their sales force is.

This response infuriated me personally, what with all the leaps of logic and propaganda.

But everyone in the office is like, what'd you expect?

The facts are that almost everyone fails.

So

what is it about our psychology, I guess, that

won't let us see that truth?

Well, there's a lot of, there's more silence than you think probably about the fact that you stated, right?

So, you know,

you've come

to

understand the failure rates.

I wouldn't say that that's common knowledge in any way.

If you look at the Federal Trade Commission fraud statistics, pyramid scheme and business opportunity fraud are the least reported fraud types that they monitor.

Really?

So this is not something that people like to tell people about.

So silence is a big problem, either because

they don't understand that they were the victim of a fraud,

they don't want to tell anyone they were a victim of a fraud.

And so, you know, even when it's just, you know, really pretty blatant,

you know, there's a lot of silence around this.

And we actually found in an experiment we did at a state fair that if you knew someone who had participated in a scheme in the past, you were more likely to try our scheme.

And my hypothesis is that it's because the experience of seeing someone else do it actually validated it as opposed to inoculating you from it.

Really?

Because you don't know what happened in many cases, right?

You don't know the true outcome.

All you know is this looks familiar to me.

I've seen it in my Facebook feed, or my sister did this, right, at one point.

And so we have a lot of work to do with even just victims and even helping them self-identify as victims and helping to spread the word, you know, or we could, if we can grow the capacity for people to actually be honest about their experience and their outcome.

I just don't think, you know, sort of the accurate picture is just

out there.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we're making this program.

To give you the accurate picture.

Next time on the dream.

The owners of Amway, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos.

One was the chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce, Van Andel.

DeVos was the finance chairman.

of the Republican Party.

At the time that Amway was being prosecuted.

Correct.

So is it possible, possible, really, that the FTC was going to truly close down a company that had such political influence with the sitting president?

I don't think so.

I am not criticizing the commission or the administrative law judge.

What I'm simply saying is that our evidence,

he didn't reject it, he ignored it.

The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere and Stitcher, written and reported by me, Jane Marie, Dan Gallucci, Mackenzie Kassab, Lyra Smith, and help from Claire Rawlinson.

We are edited by Peter Clowney.

Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.

The Dream is executive produced by Laura Mayer, Chris Bannon, Dan Gallucci, and me.

We appreciate you subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show wherever you listen.

Hello, the dream listeners.

Have you had a personal experience with MLMs?

We want to hear from you.

Leave us a voicemail at 715-600-0326 or send us an email at thisisthedreampodcast at gmail.com.

Oh yeah, do you have any Mary Kay to show me?

This is all I have and I will show it to you.

And I think that there is a psychological reason why I keep it around.

Oh, it's right on your desk, whatever it is.

It is my checkbook cover.

Now, it's 2018, and we don't write a lot of checks, but it's the Mary Kay check cover, and it's gold.

And the reason that they did it in gold is so that you could always focus on the amount of money that you could be making with the company.

And I glanced at it the other day when I was writing a check to my hairdresser, and I thought, why do I keep this thing?

And I wonder if it's just because I don't want to go back.

It's just a reminder to be better with your money.

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The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So, what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping.

And it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

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