I Never Made a Good #bossbabe (and it’s Not My Fault)
Multi-Level Marketing Schemes Prey on Women and Ruin them Financially
Making excuses is what they called it when I said that the whole thing was theft. I just didn’t have what it takes, didn’t work hard enough, and couldn’t handle the hustle. I was told that the business works if you work the business.
The women were snobby and it was clear that I was either in the club or not, and I most definitely was not. I hadn’t made my sales goals, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. I think being honest is what did me in. I can live with that.
Like many other women, I needed the money. It seemed like a good idea at the time, I had four children to support. I was disabled and couldn’t work a job, and I was told it didn’t matter because “being my own boss” was much better anyway.
Three of my children have special needs, one is severely disabled. As a single mother I didn’t have a lot of options. This would make good money, I was told, I just had to share it with everyone I met, and they would love it. After all, the product sells itself.
I tried to be a good hun, I really did, but it turns out that being honest made me a terrible hun. I was losing money before I even started, but I was told things would get better, I just had to work harder. They started sounding like television evangelists who claim that a lack of faith is what keeps people sick.
All you have to do is send the televangelist five hundred dollars, and he will pray for your healing. If you’re not healed, you didn’t have enough faith, and for another five hundred bucks, he will pray again. Just make sure you truly believe it this time.
It was like that for me with “getting saved” too. I would go and fuck things up again and realize I “never truly meant it” the first hundred times so I needed to pray it again or I’d die and go to hell. It’s not lost on me that most of the #bossbabes tend to be Christian stay-at-home moms.
All of these companies have terrible conferences, but Young Living is the worst that I’ve participated in. I thought I was at an evangelical mega-church the amount of God-talk there was. It didn’t matter that not all of their sales people were Christian, they pushed it on them anyway. I’m a Christian and I was quite offended and grossed out by the whole encounter.
Needless to say, I didn’t sell Young Living for very long. I tried to sell Jamberry at some point, but the stickers sucked and so I wasn’t willing to sell a shitty product to people just to make money. Those women bullied me and went on a campaign to make me look bad. I can look bad all by myself without any help so I don’t know why the bothered.
My upline took it as a personal insult, and to make matters worse, she was a woman I knew who I had been friends with in the past. I was still invested enough in caring about her and her family when this went down, and a long while afterwards, but it was never the same. That woman quit selling Jamberry also and began her grift with another company and was high up enough that she makes money with it.
I couldn’t remain friends with a grifter who purposely took advantage of vulnerable women anymore. I didn’t say anything I just silently removed her from my life. I doubt she even noticed because we were going in two very different directions by then.
The one I had trouble ditching, that I came back to time and time again before I figured it out, was Avon. I sold it back in Australia, and sometimes made enough money to buy what I wanted and break even. Sometimes I mad a few dollars. I sold Avon in two different cities but didn’t really get very far.
Of course it was my fault, despite the fact that most people at my level didn’t make any money either. When I moved to the USA, I joined Avon again because I was in a conservative Christian environment with no other options and I needed to be a “Proverbs 31 Woman” with my home business but never working outside the home.
Those that really wanted to be good “Proverbs 31 Women,” actually sold super expensive totes with crappy patterns from a company called Thirty-One. I knew so many women who sold Thirty-One that I don’t know how any of them sold anything. Maybe they didn’t, they might have brought all that crap for personal use.
I do believe that for me, Thirty-One was the most puke-worthy of them all because it preyed on women who wanted to be good fundamentalists by making it super Biblical so they could obey God in a trendy way. I have little patience for Jesus junk.
I finally got free of Avon, after so many years, and I had absolutely nothing in the end to show for it. I had pissed off some friends, even though I couldn’t do a hard sell with any of my friends because I felt like that was a horrible thing to do to one’s friends.
That’s part of the grift, by the way, selling to friends. Then when you stop selling you end up losing friends, because they start selling it themselves under someone else and so they become #bossbabes themselves.
It was like a weird cult just couldn’t get away from, because I lost several things. I’m glad I quit selling any of that stuff even though I’m broke. At least I’m an honest broke with friends I didn’t take advantage of, and I’m not losing money on crap.
