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Pyramid Schemes and the acquaintances that spam you with them.
Soo, a friend of mine (though I may as well call him an acquaintance at this point) is now a member of the Motor Club of America. Its a service like AAA that gives you supposed insane benefits, both vehicular and livelyhood related for a double digit monthly fee.
But...
There's another side to the service, where they encourage you to refer people to this service, and when you do, you get paid commission for it. Said commission increases exponentially the more people you refer, and the more they refer the more money YOU get etc etc.
This REEKS of bullshit, to put it lightly. You know, money for nothing get rich quick too good to be true bullshit. there IS that saying after all. "It's not what you know, it's who you know", that you keep hearing, repeated over and over like some kind of mantra. But of course you'll see videos, tumblrs and twitter feed vouching for the service, and they'll all flash 20 dollar bills in paper fan formation at the camera, to which I'm guessing they must have taken out everything left in their savings account for appearances sake.
I COULD just unfriend this person. However, he IS a coworker, mutual friend of many of my own close friends, and I'll have to see him several several more times until everyone else cuts off their ties with him in disgust.
I just have two questions: "Is this shit for real?" and "Why the fuck would you take part in a pyramid scheme only to alienate the very few people you know?"
Comments
Typically a pyramid scheme is when your membership forces you to buy shit you'll never be able to sell. Even though the sales reference commission is...very sketchy and definitely warrants investigation and caution, and a friend spamming you with it is incredibly obnoxious, multi-level marketing doesn't fall under pyramid schemes as long as they're actually selling a service to the general public without requiring customers to join the pyramid (i.e., you don't get Motor Club benefits until you've referenced X people).
http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/other/dvimf16.shtm
Yes, this is a pyramid scheme structure. Dunno if there's a legal definition of such but...yeah, I can totally see why it would be annoying.
I remember a bunch of such things going around a few years ago when I was an undergrad. There were pyramid scheme giveaways of computer hardware considered highly desirable, such as that "plug it in and go" CPU box from Apple (whatever that was called).
I think I signed up for a few of these mostly to humor people. Can't remember if I spammed my own links onward.
In other news, sometimes I wonder if modern society is a big pyramid scheme. I mean, we used to get our cheap stuff from China, but now that China's starting to develop to first-world status, where are we going to outsource our manufacturing to and get our cheap goods from? Africa? And what happens when they reach first-world status?
The robots do it, duh.
lol singularity wank
A friend from grade school tried to recruit me to one of these once. He left me alone after I told him I wasn't interested, though. He's the type that constantly spams his Facebook wall with motivational messages and has already got all the marks of a future shady enterprenuer, and he's only, like, 19. Used to be a good guy, though.
my mother used to be pretty heavily involved in (I believe) Weight Watchers, which did this for a time.
I don't know how involved in it she still is specifically, but I know she's mostly cut down on it.
Oh, yeah, I almost got involved with this Vemma thing at college. The thing is, they're pretty receptive to accusations of being a Pyramid scheme.
Vector Marketing was right on the bleeding edge (lol) of being a pyramid scheme too, but they didn't quite qualify.
They were still one of the most openly skeezy businesses I've ever seen though. So like, even if it's technically legitimate it's not always clean.
legal != ethical
I don't really have any problem in essence with the sales associate thing in the OP. Referrals are free after all. It's just when they make you foot the bill for stuff you're supposed to sell for them.