In Multilevel Marketing, Sleight of Hand Is Simply the Rule of Doing Business

New York Times

05-05-2025

So enduring is the image of America's door-to-door salesman — beguiling, relentless — that it can be easy to forget that the junk he is selling is often less pernicious than the junk he's being sold. Neighbors might resent his hawking microwaves and timeshares that they can't afford, but meanwhile his boss is hawking the lie that the job's indignities and punishing hours might one day add up to a decent living. At least the salesman's goods have a lifetime guarantee.
The travails of the American salesman grew gnarlier in the 20th century. For one, some of these salesmen are now women. Also, many are newly self-employed, thanks to the growing industry of multilevel marketing. Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' which reads like a thriller as it investigates the birth and growth of this shadowy and sprawling industry that polished up door-to-door sales with a new veneer of all-American entrepreneurialism.
Instead of working for corporate overlords, multilevel marketers are promised they can be their own bosses. They sell 'whenever and wherever they want.' They are also encouraged to recruit underlings to sell off their goods, who in turn can recruit more sellers under them. And so on and so on, forming a sort of pyramid structure — though its proponents insist it is not always a pyramid scheme.
But to anyone familiar with the rise of the gig economy, it is unsurprising that this model — work anywhere, work anytime, answer to nobody — often doesn't match the dreamy bubble wrap it comes inside.
A salesman's craft sometimes resembles the showmanship of a magician. (How else to convince someone they need a new car, with that reliable older model sitting in the garage?) Read masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business. This starts with the figure the industry calls its annual sales, which in 2022 was supposedly more than $40 billion ('more than Americans spent on legal cannabis in the same year, and almost as much as they did on pizza'). It turns out that means $40 billion in purchases made by the industry's own sellers. Nobody, Read writes, has any concrete idea how much of those sales they're able to offload onto real customers.
Read, a reporter and features writer for New York magazine, is incensed that we treat this industry as fringe, more like a radioactive subreddit than a potentially exploitative sector of the economy. In reality, 7.7 percent of Americans, or 17 million people, have been involved in these businesses at some point in their lives, nearly as many as those recovering from a substance use disorder. Some who find themselves enmeshed in the multilevel marketing web have racked up debt as a result. A 2011 study of 350 multilevel marketing businesses found that 99 percent of participants lost money.
'Little Bosses Everywhere' lays out an almost prosecutorial case against many multilevel marketing schemes, explaining why regulators need to take the industry seriously, and the larger story it tells about whom the economy has set up to fail. The book also follows the history of the sector to its roots.
When Read introduces the characters behind America's first big multilevel marketing scheme, it almost sounds like the setup to a joke: What happens when a Gilded Age dilettante, a eugenics-curious Dale Carnegie acolyte and an overzealous marketer of burial plots come together? The answer is Nutrilite, a vitamin company that in the mid-1940s started offering its distributors a new business opportunity. Instead of just selling vitamins, they could recruit other distributors and form a 'downline,' with lower-level sellers all contributing to their higher-ups' sales volume.
This business started as a hack — straggling businessmen trying to inflate their sales — but quickly became a playbook. Nutrilite's approach inspired more businesses to set up similar models, where a distributor's goal became not to sell the product but to sell the opportunity to join the enterprise.
There were Holiday Magic and Koscot, both ostensibly cosmetics companies that were found in the 1970s to have violated federal trade regulations. (The Federal Trade Commission's case led to its creation of the 'Koscot test,' which made it illegal for businesses to require participants to pay upfront for the right to sell goods and to recruit other sellers with the promise of rewards unrelated to product sales.) There is Mary Kay, the cosmetics group that sits at the book's emotional core as we watch an Air Force veteran named Monique climb the company's ranks toward the 'Princess Court' title, or maybe even the famous blush-pink Cadillac. There's also Amway, started by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos — the father-in-law of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Trump's first term.
His is not the only familiar name in the book; the 20th-century history Read traces has direct connections to today's politics. In her telling, it was partly under the leadership of Van Andel and DeVos that multilevel marketers coalesced with the New Right, forming an alliance of 'the country's wealthiest businessmen, evangelicals and other conservative Christians, positive thinkers and free-market radicals.' The story of multilevel marketing is one of Americans falling prey to the idea that they should turn against experts and big institutions: Try supplements as a way to hack your health, work for yourself as a way to hack your career. These lifestyle tips can end up forming a political worldview, too, one that's doggedly anti-expert and fiercely capitalist.
Anyone who's seen or read 'Death of a Salesman' knows that workplace dramas are as much about markets and money as they are about self-esteem warped, dreams deferred and families broken. Read captures that same heartache, quoting Arthur Miller's own description of his traveling salesman uncle, on whom he based the character Willy Loman: 'There was something in him which was terribly moving because his suffering was right on his skin.' The same could be said of some of Read's characters, except their skin might be coated in lotion from Mary Kay.