At The Bottom of the Pyramid

Photo by Drew Graham from Unsplash

This post is a long one (what else is new?), so bear with me, I have a point. About two months ago, I landed on a site that posted temporary jobs and wound up applying to a Special Events and Marketing position. The required skills were ones I already had and it sounded vaguely promising. Maybe it won't lead to anything, I thought, but it could be something else to pad my resume. I sent off my application and forgot about it.

The next day, I received an email from an HR assistant, requesting me to come in for an interview. The 'o' in the logo had a tie and a banner along the bottom featured airplanes flying over land, with the text in the email enclosed in subdued purple and yellow. My immediate thought was that there was something fishy about this. Getting a reply the day after I applied for the job was just too good to be true. Or was I being too cynical? I asked Sam, my boyfriend, and then for extra security, I forwarded the information to a woman that I dog sit for, who had recently been mentoring me in my job search. Both Sam and her agreed that it was suspicious, but thought it couldn't hurt to meet them.

My interview was three days later in a suburb of Baltimore, about 45 mins away. As I left the house, I promised to let Sam know when I arrived. "Call me in an hour if you don't hear from me!" I joked. "In case they turn out to be serial killers."  Since I don't drive, I took the light rail and walked from the station. The office wound up being in a small, low brick building that looked vague and bland, like a doctor's office. There wasn't a sign on the door outside so I just walked in and wandered down the hallway until I saw a sign next to a door. When I entered, I immediately took in the room opposite, with white walls and brown ugly carpet that was otherwise completely empty. The room I entered was a sort of small lobby with a desk on the right side of the wall, a few chairs against the wall next to the door and a tv on the wall opposite. There was a well-dressed woman behind the desk who looked about my age. She was watching Parks and Rec on the tv muted, with captions, in between making phone calls. The other door was shut. She handed me a form to fill out on a clipboard with some basic information and then had me wait.

After a few minutes a man in a shirt, tie and business-type pants came in and walked into the office nearest the desk, then closed the door. I waited about 5 more minutes, chatting with the secretary about Parks and Rec, the local area and other things I can't really recall now. Eventually, the man came out and welcomed me in, shaking my hand. I sat down opposite his desk, which was pretty sparse. He looked like a guy who would have been on the lacrosse team or a fraternity in college and studied business because he knew it would make him money.

He started telling me more about the company. He was speaking with a speed and accuracy that told me he had given this spiel a million times before. At one point, I had to ask him what he said because he was speaking so fast. After he had told me about the company, he asked me what about everything he had just told me had stood out. I thought for a second and picked out (what I thought) were the skills and ideas that were necessary to thrive in this position. I learned that the job involved selling items like the ones featured on Shark Tank - a show where people try to get judges to market and sell their inventions. More specifically, they sell these items at Costco and other similar stores. If I was hired and did well within the first week or two,  I would receive training to become a manager and be able to train other people, as well as gain my own "clients." It turned out that they barely used the office. In the morning, there were meetings, but otherwise, they spent the entire day out in stores.

This did not sound like my cup of tea at all. I immediately knew I would turn him down. This sounded like when I tried working as a canvasser one summer. It had started out with a huge group of people and soon after arriving, we were told that we needed to meet a quota by the end of the day. The next day, half of the people were gone. It seemed like the same sort of mentality. Make as much money as possible. Sell, sell, sell! It made me think of an assembly line of workers in a factory. As we were wrapping up, the man asked me what was important to me. He suggested family, career, money. I explained that family and my career were important to me. I was told that if I was accepted for the next round of interviews, I would be called the next day. I left feeling that I had done well and assured that even if I didn't get it, I was going to turn it down. I also felt a little weirded out. It had been a strange interview.

The next day, I was describing to a co-worker how weird it had all seemed. The tiny office, the fast talking-sales-oily-fake feeling I got. As I explained what happened, he started asking me lots of questions about the kinds of people who were there and what exactly the guy had said. Finally, he explained that I had just interviewed with a company known as an MLM or multi-level marketing. They are a type of pyramid scheme and are illegal. According to my co-worker, they take an office space for a few months, hire a bunch of people, train them very fast and then have them managing clients very quickly on. After a few months, they move and change their name. The items they sell are like the ones on Shark Tank but are cheap replications made in Asia. Many of these companies work you very hard and sometimes won't let you spend time with outside people. They all eat together and go to bars together. It verges on a cult. Some people who work for them wind up owing them tons of money and even committing suicide. I didn't really want to believe what I was hearing. I couldn't imagine people being taken advantage of in such an intense way, but I also wasn't that surprised. I did some of my own research to figure out if this were really true.

I've heard of pyramid schemes before in financial news stories or in movies where some rich businessman turns out to be stealing tons of money from people. But I really only had a vague idea. When it comes to finance, I get lost pretty quickly. But, from what I could understand, a pyramid scheme involves gaining investors and promising already existing consumers or investors money if they recruit even more investors. There may be the pretense of selling retail goods, but the real money comes from gaining more investors. Many companies use a product to hide the scheme. However, new recruits often have to buy the goods at inflated prices and buy more than they could ever sell, so that the products pile up, costing newbies tons of money. The people at the bottom make little to no money and the people at the top of the pyramid make all of the money.

MLMs, like this company, are sometimes similar to pyramid schemes but not exactly the same. For one thing, they actually do sell products and consumers don't have to pay excessive amounts of money or buy into the system. However, many of these small companies are owned by main big ones that will change the companies' names frequently and start over in a new place. Googling some of the names, I found a lot of personal stories of MLMs screwing people over, but not a lot of coverage from mainstream media. It seems like the scam here is that by recruiting new distributors, current distributors get a percentage of the new recruits' sales. Although MLMs can be legitimate, it seems that often the lines between pyramid schemes and legal business practices can become blurred. According to Investopedia, you can usually tell if an MLM is running a legal business depending on if they flat out sell their products to consumers or if they require their members to recruit new ones to buy the products. The former is normal, but the latter is illegal.

I wasn't sure which one I had stumbled on, to be honest. When I did my pre-interview research for this job, I found it odd that there was little to no information on the company. There was one review on Glassdoor that listed the company private, with one to fifty employees and the rest (revenue, founder and so on) was unknown.

There was one review. It said:
Application: 
I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at  in June 2016.
Interview:
They first set up a brief informative discussion- 20 minutes. The president is Sam, he tells you about the company- REALLY QUICKLY. Not too many questions- I'm pretty sure anyone can get the job. The job is essentially you sitting at Costco or Sams Club and trying to sell products that aren't sold in stores (because they aren't household brands). If you've ever heard of Vivid in Columbia it's essentially the same thing but different product. Like the people in the middle of the mall who try to put lotion on your hands. They promise you a quick growth to a management role.
You make $10/hour and 9 percent commission starting "but within a year can be pushing upwards of $80,000"- doubtful, I've been working in sales and this is BOGUS. No matter which position you apply for they are all the same starting from the bottom and growing to the manager role.
I honestly think the job posting is misleading. Would have rather known upfront to not waste my time. They have people back to back to interview. There were 3 of us in the office within the 20 minutes I was there.
If you are just graduating High School or looking for a temporary job and have no bills GO FOR IT.

A lot of this sounded familiar. The interviewer's name was Sam. Just like with me, he had spoken very quickly about the job with this person. I had been promised a significant raise if I moved up within the company. And it does sound bogus. No one goes from $10/hr to 80,000 within a year. No one.

I never got a followup phone call. I suspect it was because I hadn't listed money as one of my main motivators. Frankly, I'm not upset. Even if this wasn't an extreme case as some of the others I had heard of through my research and my co-worker, something had been off.

Interviews and scams like this make me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I found it so frustrating that everyday people come up with new ways to try to screw other people over. All in the name of money. Don't they have any humanity in them? Doesn't all of that manipulation get tiring at the end of the day? I just don't think I could ever do it. Not only would my conscious weigh on me, but the lies and worry about being found out would weigh on me even more.

If you've read this far, I would love your opinion or similar stories, if you have any. Is this a rare case or is this something I should expect more and more? Millennials get a lot of flack for being lazy or not being willing to try a traditional job. But it's so hard to stand out from hundreds of other applicants every day and experiences like these make me want to try less and less. Still, there's no other choice if I want a job except to go forward and leave the bad experiences behind, as reminders of the worst case scenario. That and the fact that it gives me a good story to write about.