Amway, Mary Kay, Herbalife and the Get Rich Quick Business
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode of Organized Money, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen are joined by journalist and author Bridget Read to unravel the shadowy world of multi-level marketing (MLM) and pyramid schemes. Drawing from Bridget’s new book, Little Bosses Everywhere, How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, they explore how companies like Amway, Herbalife, and Mary Kay built vast empires by selling not just products but the promise of entrepreneurship and financial freedom—when in reality, most participants end up losing money. The conversation reveals MLM’s deep ties to American politics, highlighting how the industry helped shape the modern conservative movement and evade federal regulation, with figures like the DeVos family fueling both business and political influence. From cult-like positive thinking and self-help roots to the exploitation of vulnerable communities, the episode exposes how the allure of “being your own boss” often conceals a cycle of extraction, false hope, and systemic harm that reaches far beyond personal finances—shaping culture, politics, and the American dream itself.
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Having been an Amway distributor at the age of twelve and a Shaklee distributor at twenty-one, my own perspective has undergone several evolutions on MLM.
The first thing to remember, is that MLM follows the standard business model of hierarchical compensation. That is to say, that a sales manager is typically compensated with a commission percentage of what his staff sells.
Okay, fair enough; the underlying model is uncontroversial.
Where it becomes "snake oil" is the marketing ploy. Having gone on to study business and taking a few sales positions, it eventually occurred to me that marketing an "instant sales manager, just pay this much to get started" model, is a guaranteed "setup-to-fail." A sales manager's true role is to assist salespeople in selling product to new customers. Residuals are an important incentive, but they are not supposed to be any sort of a sinecure.
The reason I became a Shaklee distributor, was that I had an idea of selling superior surfactants to road construction companies. Their water trucks wet down newly-graded roadways to keep the dust down. Surfactants "make the water wetter" (an oversimplification, but good enough to go on with.)
I wasn't interested in signing up distributors, I wanted to sell 55-gallon drums full of product. In other words, to "sell the steak, not the sizzle."
Well, the MLM hierarchical structure has too many layers, to begin with. Even buying direct, the structure has too many managerial "cuts" to pay out; there's nothing left for the salesman. The secondary issue, was that there were already competitive products, and their usage had to fulfill certain criteria that the product I was selling couldn't meet.
An essay on this minutiae writes itself, but there's an underlying point that encompasses all arguments; is the product any good at the price point it must be sold at to turn a profit?
If yes, sell the heck out of it on the basis of verified features and benefits. If no, how much of what you're selling is just the sizzle?
Well, it's been half a century since that first junior distributor experience. In hindsight, what MLM is selling is an appeal to greed, a chance to get sales money without doing the hard, slogging footwork of selling product, rather than hot air.
Follow the money, wherever it leads. That surveillance takes us to some unexpected places....
Both Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders (exploiters) and land speculators (Ponzi schemers). It's pretty difficult to avoid "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." - Balzac ... in the founding of the USA.