Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Today we have something dazzling for you to see. Something downright amazing. Women. Hundreds of thousands of them. Selling gobs and gobs of Mary Kay Cosmetics to actual customers who can’t seem to get enough of these wondrous products. They’re lining up outside houses of Mary Kay consultants… banging on the doors and begging to be allowed to buy these miracle products… They are in a frenzy!

JUST KIDDING!!!!

Another week, another installment of “No one’s making a living selling Mary Kay products.” Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say “no one,” as there are a few women in the United States who are. But as for those other 1.1 million women….

Below we have a list of the top 50 consultants in a Mary Kay national area with at least 27 units. The top ten units have 620 consultants, and if we assume that the remaining units each have 30 members, that gives us a total of about 1,130 consultants for the entire area.

Here’s how the calculation works:

1. We pretend that all of the product shown here has been sold. We know it really hasn’t. In fact, our personal experiences tell us that most of it probably isn’t sold. But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume all has been sold.
2. We estimate 40% profit on the sales. That’s very generous as well. The only way to make that much would be to sell all of the product at the full retail price (which we know doesn’t happen) and to keep expemses very low.
3. We divide that profit by the number of months included in the total orders to get monthly profit, and then multiply by 12 to get annualized profit.

With these parameters, here are the top 50 consultants in the area:

What do we see from these top 50 consultants? We see that if the number one consultant sells all her stuff at full price all year, she might make about $18,000 on product sales for the year.

Not bad you say? Well I say that this is completely un-impressive if this is supposed to be the absolute TOP seller in the entire area.

But it gets better. We have a grand total of TEN consultants who will make $10,000 or more for the year if they sell all their stuff at full retail. *gulp* Only TEN women out of 1,130 in the area even have a shot at making $10,000 or more for the year? That’s frightening. If the best women in this whole area are making that little, how little is everyone else making???

Well you can scan down the list and see that it’s not very much. Those at the bottom don’t even have a shot at profiting $400 per month from selling the products.

And what about the other 1,080 women in the area who aren’t on this list? They’re making even less. Scary, isn’t it? But that’s the sad reality in a product-based pyramid scheme like Mary Kay. Almost no money is made from selling the product… which is why the focus is constantly on recruiting and getting large initial orders.