| Hi Robert
I am sorry if my opinion on this matter sounds harsh and some may see it as misled. I am sorry for this but it is a very strong personal view i have which i would like to state plainly.
Firstly on Quixtar, i am sure that i have read it on another board but i am under the impression that it is part of or affiliated in some way with Amway. If this is unture please accept my mistake i dont want to be deceptive in anyway.
Ok on to MLM/Pyramid scheme's. Yes i know they are supposedly not the same thing but. From what i have read and seen a MLM program is just a disguise for a Pyramid Scheme. No matter which is it they all start with one person at the top and flow down building levels wider and wider. The difference as i am aware is that a pyramid scheme does not have a product where MLM does.
Now for why they all fall down. The only way to make money is to sign up more people. But there will be a point where there are no more people to sign up, at this point there becomes a problem. In pretty much every MLM scheme i have seen you have a minmum monthly spend somewhere between 50-150 or more a month.
This is where the first problem arises you greatly decrease your target market because there is a great number of people who cannot afford it. So back comes the MLM company stating but they are every day products you can buy our product instead of what you would buy at the supermarket. Yes this may be true but i am not aware of to many supermarkets that make enough profit on their goods that they could pay a commission to 6 or 7 people above you and still make money on their products. This leaves you with the problem that the products you are buying from your MLM company are now costing you more then if you were buying them from the supermarket.
This is where many people get caught up, yes it is great they you have this MLM business you can now make some money with but you are spending more to buy the same products you buy at the supermarket. Now how many people actualyl go into a MLM business thinking about they have to sign people up to benifit, they all do of course but how many actually can find enough if any people to join up so they are making money.
I have seen one recently that does the same thing with phones. The stats that they are working on is that you need to find 100 people who spend on average of $100 a month on their phone and if you have that many people you will make $800 a month. I dont know about you but i can think of no less then a dozen ways that i could make $800 a month without having to go out and try to convince 100 people to sign up to use a MLM phone company. I could go and find 20 people who will pay me $40 to mow their lawn once a month a lot easier and make the same money for maybe working every saturday.
To finish off the way i see every MLM business/scheme/oppertunity what ever you want to call it, is as a pyramid scheme in disguise. They will never work except for the few that either start them or that get in a real good spot that they have a lot of suckers that will sign up. The problem they will find is that they have to work really hard to maintain the people they are signing up because people arnt stupid if it isnt working for them they will leave, and if you dont have the type of personality needed you will not be successful in a MLM scheme.
One thing that is interesting though is i though Pyramid schemes where illegal, i knwo they are in Australia and thought that they were in the US as well. But the fact that Quixtar is fiarly well know it wouldnt still be around if it was purly a pyramid scheme, they would ahve to have it disguised some other way if it in fact is. |