Monavie article

[Lambkin]

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/cougars/53 ... t.html.csp

The once-surging Utah-based seller of a blend of fruit juices, MonaVie LLC, is rebranding itself to the world as "MonaVie Community Commerce: The No. 1 Business Opportunity."

The company hopes the phrase better represents what multilevel marketing — also called direct sales or network sales — in which company revenue comes from selling products to independent distributors. Distributors, in turn, are told they can earn anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to fabulous riches through retail sales and commissions from building "downlines" of distributors beneath them.

But behind the new slogan, which suggests a kind of intimate, we’re-all-in-this-together, friends-and-family business model, still lies a stark statistical reality. An analysis of the average earnings data provided by MonaVie in 2009, when it last supplied distributors with comprehensive numbers, reveals that 98.5 percent of distributors who earned commissions averaged just $129 a month despite the pitches to the contrary.

[wserra]

This is an absolute must-read article for everyone interested in this "industry". Not only does it describe the matters Lambkin quotes - how the big guys get rich at the expense of the little guys, who have virtually no chance of making a living despite the hype and would have significantly better odds at a casino. It also goes on to track how those "big guys" hop from one ripoff to another once the ship starts to sink. How the companies themselves help out the big guys with things such as forgiven "loans", all the while proclaiming to the masses that you can get rich with virtually no investment. It describes the huge distributor turnover rates, sometimes over 50% per year, and how therefore recruiting is the paramount effort.

Funniest, though - at least for me - are the quotes attributed to Ralph Carson, Monavie's "chief science officer" and the creator of the original Monavie jungle juice. In a Monavie internal memo, he wrote that the stuff was actually "expensive flavored water. Any claims made are purely hypothetical, unsubstantiated and, quite frankly, bogus." That "chief science officer" actually admitted in a deposition that he had no idea what was in the current version.

You gotta credit a Salt Lake paper for writing this article.

[Kestrel]

Very eye-opening article for the uninformed.

There's a lady I see on Sunday mornings who recently bought herself a "distributorship" with a newly launched MLM called Beyond Organic. She keeps finding ways to work praise for this MLM's products into our discussions.

I'm going to try to get her to read this MonaVie article. Maybe a dim light will shine through her MLM wall of true belief. I can just picture the conversation afterwards, though...

"This company is different." (No, it's not.)

"I got in on the ground floor when it first started." (When they started selling distributorships the ground floor was already a mile above you. You're just in the first wave of victims.)

"The founder, Jordan Rubin, has two doctorate degrees and is professionally certified." (Quackwatch has a whole page just about Jordan Rubin. His 'degrees' and certification are frauds from diploma mills.)

"He was fabulously successful with his first company, Garden of Life, then sold it to launch an even better company." (Garden of Life was successful until the FTC shut him down for making fraudulent and misleading claims that his so-called health supplements cured cancer and other medical conditions. He paid a hefty fine, too.)

"His diet is biblically based. It's the way God wants us to eat. He was dreadfully sick, but when he followed God's eating plan God cured his Crohn's disease." (The devil loves using the bible to hoodwink us. Many key parts of Rubin's diet are not found anywhere in the bible. Crohn's disease can go into remission with a careful diet, but it comes back. Besides, I don't have Crohn's.)

"Beyond Organic is an environmentally-friendly virtual Farmer's Market bringing pure wholesome foods directly to you." (Hamburger for $10/pound, hotdogs for $13/pound, cheese for $19/pound, 'dairy beverages' for $6.75/pint... And I missed the part about how 'environmentally friendly' it is use diesel and dry ice to ship this wholesome food from Kansas City, Missouri.)

"Beyond Organic University will educate you and your family on nutrition, fitness, organic farming, and hygiene, so that you can bring hope and health to a world which desperately needs it." (See the above comment about Jordan Rubin's fraudulent degrees. Now you want me to pay $200/year to take classes from him? And get certified... in what, exactly? A quick look through the 'educational materials' reveals that they are merely MLM infomercials.)

Oh, yes, if I can get this lady to sit down with me, this is going to be one very interesting convesation.