I love showing the numbers for Mary Kay product sales. What better way of proving that this company is a product-based pyramid scheme? Yes, I said it. Pyramid scheme.

Almost no one is making a living from selling products. So what are they really selling? The “opportunity.”

That’s right. Recruit and frontload. That’s the Mary Kay way.

So I think that a great exercise for 2008 will be to go through units and areas one by one, and show how little is being sold. Here are the guidelines for looking at these numbers… you’ll see these more than once this year, but I’ve always got to review for the benefit of our new members.

1. This national area is known as one that “really sells!” The nsd has a reputation of “teaching her girls to sell.”

2. We’re pretending that all of the product shown here has been sold. In reality, we know it has not been sold. We know from the personal experiences of thousands of Mary Kay consultants that very little of what is ordered, is actually sold. But here we’ll give the benefit of the doubt. We’ll assume all has been sold.

3. We estimate 40% profit on the sales. That’s very generous. It assumes very frugal expenses and that all products are sold at full suggested retail. If you’ve ever sold Mary Kay, you know that a lot of discounting is necessary to sell the junk. But we’ll still give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend that all is sold at full retail. We’ll also assume that they kept their expenses very, very low (which is hard) and therefore were able to profit 40%.

Here are the top 20 consultants in the area:

Now remember.. these are the very top, very highest ordering consultants. If they’re selling these products, they’re representing the 20 women out of 17 units (nsd’s unit plus 16 offspring directors) who sold THE MOST. That’s somewhere between 800 and 1,200 women total… and these are the best 20.. the top 2% or so of the whole area.

And the number one woman on this list is profiting less than $15,000 a year if she keeps this pace, sells it all, sells it at full price, and keeps her expenses low.

Is $15,000 for that very top woman even a real living? And check out the rest of the list. If they’re all selling all that they ordered…. they have a chance to maybe make $7,000 or $8,000 or $9,000 a year.

Oh… you say that maybe they don’t want to make much more. Well all I’m saying is that these are the very top women in the area, and 98% of the area (all the rest of them) won’t even make this much from selling products.

The point is that the money to be made from product sales is pathetic for almost everyone in this pyramid scheme.