Beach Body Thoughts

(I did get a new camera, by the way)

Ok. So...Beach Body is doing away with their coaches. It seemed like it was working well to me. As of 2007 things have changed. Anyone can be a coach if they pay the $39 ish fee. And then you can recruit coaches under you...it's a stinking MLM. Why oh why?!?!

I'm quite unhappy now that I've done some research on MLMs. I've never been involved in one and now I know I never will!

Here's some quotes that I found online:

Where is the "switch" that can be flipped in an MLM when enough sales people are hired? In a normal company a manager says, "We have enough, let's stop hiring people at this point." But in an MLM, there is no way to do this. An MLM is a human "churning" machine with no "off button." Out of control by design, its gears will grind up the money, time, credibility, and entrepreneurial energy of well-meaning people who joined merely to supplement their income. Better to just steer clear of this monster to begin with.

There is simply no way to avoid the built-in failure mechanism of MLMs. If a company chooses to market this way, it will eventually "hire" (with no base pay and charging to join) far too many people.

Thus, the only "control system" will be the inevitable losses and subsequent bad image the MLM company will gain after it does what it was designed to do: fail. And sooner or later we have got to stop blaming this particular MLM company or that, and admit that the MLM technique itself is fundamentally flawed.

Some modern incarnations of MLMs attempt to address this particular problem by limiting the number of people you can sponsor, say, to four. But the same geometric expansion problems exist; the failure mechanism has just been slowed down a bit. And now there is the added problem of even more unnecessary layers in the organization.

The claim that an MLM is merely a "common man" implementation of a normal real-world distribution channel becomes even more absurd in this case. Imagine buying a product or service in the real world and having to pay overrides and royalties to five or ten unneeded and uninvolved "distributor" layers. Would this be efficient? What value do these layers of "distributors" provide to the consumer? Is this rational? Would such a company exist long in a competitive environment?

Here is the link to where I got these quotes:

http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html

(I tried to post the link, but it didn't work)

I've really enjoyed the time I've spent on the BB forums. There are some great people on there. I'm afraid the focus is going tp be taken off of fitness and shifted over to greed.

Here's another quote:

MLMs grow by exploiting people's relationships. If you are going to be in an MLM, you swallow hard and accept this as part of "building your business." This is "networking." But to those not "in" the MLM, it seems as if friendship is merely a pretext for phoniness, friendliness is suspected as prospecting, and so on. There is no middle ground here, try as you might.

and

Thus the MLM organization becomes exploitative, and many high-level MLM promoters have been shut down, the "executives" incarcerated, for selling the fraud of impossible success to others. Other, larger MLMs have survived by hiring large batteries of attorneys to ward off federal prosecutors, even bragging about the funds they have in reserve for this purpose.

The unfortunate "distributor" at the bottom is the loser, and once this becomes apparent beyond all the slick videotapes and motivational pep-talks, good people start to get a bad taste in their mouths about the whole situation.

So, yes, money can be made with MLM. The question is whether the money being made is legitimate or "made" via a sophisticated con scheme. And if MLM is "doomed by design" to fail, then the answer is, unfortunately, the latter.

I was attracted to this idea at first. I have talked to people here and there about my success with BB dvds. Some are family. I thought...well, I really like what BBs products have done for me...why not share in some of the profit?

Now I know why. Ethically this MLM stuff is not for me!