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I sold cutco knives for a month.
If you're looking for a job, stay the fuck away from anything dealing with "CutCo" or "Vector Marketing."
Edit: Its not really a pyramid scheme... They just do everything they can to weasel out of giving you your paycheck on payday and because it's sales commission, I don't think they have to follow minimum wage laws since you're not paid hourly.
Unless they've seriously changed how it fundamentally works (this was when I was 18). They never encouraged or paid extra for getting others to sell for you, like a typical MLM thing.
Or any other kind of pyramid scheme, really
So what is actually the deal with CutCo? I know they’re a scam, everyone knows they’re a scam, but this one particular woman I know to be in general not a dummy, says her son spent the summer selling their knives once and made good money.
Was he just lying to her? How does the scam work?
Like all these multi-level-marketing scams, the scam part is that you have to buy your stock from the company/from your "upline", and then whether or not you make money depends on you reselling your stock.
John Oliver did an excellent video on the overall topic. Definitely worth the watch.
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MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can't select which stock they're buying. Gee, I wonder what you're gonna be getting...
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
Fun fact: MLMs cannot be made illegal because they're a quintessential expression of pure capitalism.
What about making your country not pure capitalism
Literally communism.
The knives are decent; if the only way to get a new one wasn’t through an MLM I might actually buy them.
It's not an MLM or pyramid scheme; it is regular sales employment. You're not getting other people to sell them for you nor are you encouraged to find others looking to join the sales team. It just sucks dick because the pay is shit (and they go through hoops to pay you less or nothing; which is where the scam part comes in), they treat you like shit, and you have to basically sell them door-to-door.
It's stupid because the knives are great products; I still have my sample set because they actually rock. They just only sell them like Tupperware clubs and only market them via word of mouth. They'd be making bank if they just sold them to retailers instead of fucking with young people looking for their first job.
Oh ok, good to know! They’re always lumped in with MLMs so I always thought they were one. I appreciate the correction, even if they still have a predatory business model—just a different one than MLMs.