Why I Hate MLMs... Even when I love their products.

Since moving to Kentucky three years ago, I feel like I have been noticing the growing number of MLMs (Multi-level Marketing).  In case you are unfamiliar with the term, some examples include Mary Kay, Pampered Chef, Thirty-One, Avon, etc.  It seems that now there is an MLM for almost everything.  Before moving I knew a handful of people that participated in the big ones like Mary Kay or Pampered Chef, but since moving, it seems like every other post on Facebook or person I know seems to be a rep/consultant/distributor/whatever for some company.  I believe MLMs appeal mostly to families with one parent that stays home.  I have also found them popular among families with a parent in school, since they can provide additional income.  However, I am not interested in buying into the MLM model, even when I love their products.  My most recent experience with this paradigm has been with Essential Oils.  I was introduced to Essential Oils a few months ago by a dear friend and really have enjoyed using them and learning more about them.  We, as a family, try to stay as natural as possible and Essential Oils seemed to be a good fit for us.  However, the company that I was introduced to is an MLM.  Young Living (as well as it's counterpart, DoTerra) serve as the big players in the essential oils market and are both MLMs.  So, I am going to use Young Living as my example as I go through the reasons I hate MLMs.  Most if not all of these reasons apply to all MLMs, regardless of the product or business structure.

1:  MLMs pass on a significant amount of unnecessary cost to the consumer.

 You know all those great rewards and discounts that top sellers get in MLMs?  Guess who pays for them!  All of us!  That's right, every person who purchases a product from a company that is an MLM is paying higher prices than necessary to cover the cost of rewards and discounts for the top people.  Think about it this way:  Through Young Living, if you reach the rank of silver in six months, you get an Aroma Complete kit for free.  Now, I don't really know what it takes to reach that rank as far as how many people under you, but I do know that Aroma Complete kits retail for well over $1,000.  I also know of at least five people that hit that rank last month in my tiny network alone, not to mention the whole company.  That means that the company is giving away thousands upon thousands of dollars in product every month.  Someone is paying for it, and here's the kicker, it's you.

2:  MLMs seem to brainwash their distributors and create biased reviews.

Okay, that may sound harsh, but here is what I mean.  Have you ever met anyone who sells some sort of MLM product that is not totally in love with the product and feels that it can be the only product of any quality on the market.  They all seem to also think that their company offers the highest integrity, has the best leaders, and the best business model.  Now, I understand brand loyalty.  I buy the same brand underwear because I like the way they fit, but that doesn't mean that I believe everyone should buy my brand of underwear or that my brand of underwear are the only brand that will really get the job done or that the company that makes my brand of underwear is the only company that makes quality underwear.  See how silly that would be?  However, that is what MLM distributors seem to be like.  I am going to continue using Essential Oils as the example.  Every Young Living Distributor I know will tell you that Young Living is the only company making 100% pure therapeutic grade essential oils.  Unfortunately, that is not true.  The bottom line is that both Young Living and DoTerra use the same methods for growing and extracting their essential oils.  After all, DoTerra was started by people who left Young Living.  But aside from the big MLMs, there are a handful of regular companies making 100% pure therapeutic grade essential oils using the same methods and plants.  It seems that since these companies cannot remain competitive through cost (see above), they gain customers by claiming that they are the biggest and the best and the only product worth having.  But, when your livelihood relies on getting others to like a product enough to sell it, you may have to bend the truth a bit. 

3:  MLMs can create tax burdens that distributors are not prepared for.

Disclaimer:  I am no accountant.  But, my husband had his own business for the first couple years of our marriage.  I saw through him the tax burden that having a personal business can create.  Everything from commission to bonuses to prizes to merchandise kept in stock can have an effect on your taxes at the end of the year.  That is the main reason I would never want to make money from an MLM.  Our taxes are complicated enough thank you very much.  My fear is that distributors are not educated on proper record keeping and tax issues and are left open to potentially high tax bills or audits.  No one that has ever talked with me about selling any product for an MLM has ever talked about taxes.  Not one.  That is frightening.

4:  MLMs are all win for the company.

It seems that everyone participating in MLMs feels that they are getting a great deal.  They talk about all the rewards and discounts and great products, but the bottom line is, the real winners are the owners and other top ranking officials of these companies.  Essentially, these companies are able to spread a product without a single store, marketing campaign, or distribution deals with stores.  They create armies of die hard sellers and distributors that do all the ground work.  Are the heart, they are pyramid schemes and the top of the pyramid wins big.

There you have it, the big four.  The four reasons I hate MLMs.  The downside is, sometimes I do love their products.  I do really enjoy Young Living oils.  I also have a pretty great Thirty-One lunch box and bag that I like quite a bit.  But, I would much rather purchase these products at closer to actual retail cost and not feel like I have to decide who is my better friend for who I order through.  I also do not appreciate companies that automatically sign you up as a distributor just for buying their product.  But that may only apply to a handful of these companies. 

The Rule of Averages: My Take on Body Image

I don't normally write or talk about body image issues because I really try not to waste too much energy on it, but let's face it, I am a female in America so I have thought about it.  Lately I have been thinking about why we seem to have such an issue with body image in the good old U.S. of A.  I was watching a show on Netflix from Australia (Dance Academy if you are curious) and noticed that despite all of the main characters being ballerinas, they did not seem excessively skin
ny to me.  It made me wonder why body image, like many things, seems to be so much more of a problem in this country.  Being a fan of statistics, I had to try to find some good old numbers to back me up.  Here they are:

Both the United States and Australia have similar rates of eating disorders at around 9% of the population.  My idea that America was way ahead in this race was wrong, but does not change my perception of the problem, only widens the scope to a global issue.

Some more unsettling statistics for the United States include:

This is me in 7th Grade (Looking Confident, right?)

• 42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner
• 81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat
• Of American, elementary school girls who read magazines, 69% say that the pictures influence their concept of the ideal body shape. 47% say the pictures make them want to lose weight

The idea that such young children are already struggling with body image is so very unsettling and makes me wonder what all contributes.  There is tons of research on the influence of media, toys, beauty pageants. and peers.  I do wonder though, are we really considering everything?  Would changing beauty images really make a difference or are there other subtle things that influence our children to think about and worry about weight.

I am going to get a little vulnerable and I want to apologize to my family up front.  Know that I love you all and this is not an attack nor am I blaming you fro anything.  I was always a skinny kid.  I grew tall really young and was always pretty thin.  Among my family members, I was somewhat unique.  Like many families in the U.S., most of family would be classified as overweight.  When I was young, I remember thinking that I did not want to grow up to be overweight like my family.  I was going to beat genetics and stay a thin girl forever.  I have never wanted to be the thinnest or to look like a super model, I just didn't want to have to have the struggles I saw my mother have.  Struggles to find a swimsuit that looked okay or to find pants that fit well.  As I got older, several members of my family were diagnosed with Type II diabetes.  I hardened my resolve to beat genetics and not have to cut sugars and carbs and feel the need to turn to artificial sweeteners to avoid a bland diet.  I never knew who I wanted to look like, but I knew who I didn't. 

When I got pregnant with my son, I weighed about ten pounds more than I really wanted to, but I had been half-heartedly trying to loose those ten pounds for years, so it wasn't the end of the world.  I again made my resolve.  I had seen women gain fifty to eighty pounds during a pregnancy and enter Mommyhood with a completely different body than they had.  I didn't know who I wanted to be, but I knew who I didn't want to be.  After my little was born, I lost half of what I gained.  The other half has hung around.  So be it.  I do wonder, though, if blaming the super skinny models and celebrities isn't the whole issue.  Maybe we need to be blaming the idea that overweight people are somehow less than, or someone you don't want to be.  We have been spending so much time fighting obesity that we may be scaring young children into body image issues.  Young children may not always want to be Miss America, but they also don't want to be The Biggest Loser.

The bottom line is, I am average sized for an American woman.  In 2010, the average woman was 5'4" and weighed 165 ponds.  I am little taller and a little heavier than that so I figure I am in the ballpark.  But sometimes I still get comments like, "You don't look like you weight that much?" or "These pants are a 10, they would fit you right?"  Some people may find people thinking they are thinner they are to be a good thing, but to me it says that my actual weight or actual pants size is not okay or not average.

We seem to have lost a sense of what average is in this country.  I was recently struck by baby clothing sizes.  This may be a stretch, but stick with me.  My son has always been on the small size when it comes to percentiles, usually hovering between the 10th and 20th percentile for weight and the 20th and 30th for length.  Remember, these percentiles are based on the sizes of babies across the entire country.  But, throughout his life, he has progressed through infant clothing sizes right on time.  He moved up to 3 month clothes when he was 3 months old, 6 months at 6 months and now that he is almost 18 months he is just transitioning into 18 month clothing.  So, if he is on the small side, why are infant clothing sizes seemingly perfect for him?  Can we really be sending a message that smaller is more "right" at such a young age?  I here other parents say how "huge" their baby is when their 6 month old is wearing 12 month clothes, but the bottom line is, that even infant clothing is set up to skew our idea of average.

Maybe if we embraced average we could loosen the grip of poor body image from our young people.  Little girls should not need to feel like they should be thinner at the age of six.  Are we telling average girls that they are above average?  Are we scaring them with our anti-obesity campaigns to the point of unhealthiness?  Body image is complex and everyone has different experiences, but we need to remember that Barbie and Miss America are not the only issues here.  There just may be more to it.

Puzzles

I love puzzles!  All kinds of puzzles!  I love jigsaw puzzles, word puzzles, number puzzles, all puzzles.  I used to get excited in math class when we got to do logic puzzles.  You know, the grids where you had to figure out which of five people had which of five pets and went to which of five restaurants from a list of clues.  Don't remember or have no idea what I am talking about?  Check them out here.  Try one, have your kids try one.  You will have fun, I promise.  Anyway, as I have gotten older, I have found that life is full of puzzles and some are more fun than others.

I am studying to be a school psychologist.  If you don't know what a school psychologist does, we do evaluations for special education determination, provide school based psychological services, and implement interventions to improve student outcomes.  We have a lot of roles, but that covers the basics.  When a student is referred for evaluation, it becomes my job to solve the puzzle of why they are struggling and what we can do to help them be successful.  Is the student failing all her classes because she just doesn't care or because she doesn't understand or because she can't see the board or because she doesn't speak good English?  I think that is part of the reason I love school psychology.  I love solving the puzzles!

There are also puzzles in parenthood.  Caedmon has gone through many stages where his behavior changed in some way and we were trying to solve the puzzle as to why.  For example, he was an extremely fussy and challenging eater and we discovered it was because he was eating too much.  He has been screaming when we try to put him down for a nap in the evening and it seems to be because he doesn't really need that nap anymore.  It is constantly a game of puzzles.  Some puzzles we still haven't solved, such as why he spits up so much and why some nights he sleeps really well while others he is a hot mess.  Some we will never solve.  That is hard for me to handle.  The reality that I won't be able to solve the puzzle.  I don't like to leave a puzzle unfinished. 

In both my career and my life there will be puzzles that I can not solve.  It is a learning process to be able to let go and accept that fact.  Some puzzles have to remain undone, or half done, or almost finished and that has to be good enough.  So do a logic puzzle and remember that sometimes it is okay to not know the answer.



*UPDATE* I am down to 172lbs.  That is 3lbs lost since my last post.  Slow progress, but progress none the less.  I look forward to continuing to reclaim my health and remain accountable.

I want to re-name my blog.  The first title was just too long, I am not sure about what I changed it to now.  I am going to think of some options and put up a pole next week to try to find a name that really fits my purpose and my personality.

Here goes nothing...

So, I have thought about starting a blog many times over the last year.  I used to write all the time.  Now I write papers, but I never write "for me" anymore.  Plus, some of the coolest people I know have blogs!  I am talking about you Kate at Osito, Carrie at Quite Carried Away, and my favorite baking blog Bakingdom.  These Moms have inspired me to share my stories, passions, and life with the world (or at least some friend) via the internet.

As the title suggests, I am busy.  I am a full time grad student working on getting my PhD in School Psychology at the University Kentuck, a wife, and a mommy to a wonderful 4.5 month old, Caedmon.  When I get a moment to myself, I bake cupcakes, read, or knit.  I want to share all of this with you!  Knitting projects, recipes, book reviews, and general stories and life lessons I learn while trying to juggle life.

My first goal is to publish a post once a week.  I think that is a good start and realistic for my life.  I hope you read and enjoy, but if you don't, at least I am writing again and I think that will be good for my soul.

Here goes nothing...