To Those Lurking on Pink Truth
Written by SuzyQ
This is for all of those who read but don’t comment. Have you seen enough? Have the writings on Pink Truth mirrored your experience in Mary Kay? Is it time to make a change? To the lurkers…
What will it take? What do we need to say to help you discover the truth about Mary Kay and your “chance” of success? There have been so many posts discussing everything from avoiding the expense of Seminar to the not so free cars, to NSDs doing and saying whatever it takes to keep the directors in their area from jumping ship, to product changes… the list goes on and on.
So, let’s talk about production, shall we?
Certain months tend to be “bad” months for production. July is one of them, as directors have tapped out their units in order to meet “year end goals” in June. No one has any money or credit left, and they certainly don’t need any more products after all they have stockpiled. Mary Kay likes to run contests during those slow months… things like double credit or special bonuses based on team production. Do you find this a bit questionable? January is another slow month as consultants look at all the holiday crap they haven’t sold (that they were told to order because MK always runs out!) and realize they shouldn’t order for a long time.
Have you figured out that when sales or recruiting is down, a new “contest” is launched? Just for fun… check out the newsletter this month from your director, or better yet, check out your NSDs newsletter or web page and see if the numbers are down. It might be fun, too, to think about the Queen of Sales at your meetings and sort of keep track of her sales versus her orders for the month.
Bear in mind that your Cadillac director needs an average of $17,000 each month to maintain production, your Premier Club director needs $9,500, and the Grand Achievers need $7,000 to avoid a co-pay. Directors do get car credit when they recruit a new qualified personal, it counts as an additional $600 towards the car. It might be fun to ask your director to meet her new personal team members! Have you received the infamous “Dialing for Dollars” calls or emails from your director?
The same song, second verse will be sung again various times throughout the year, especially in May and June… and the pressure is on to finish the courts, the car re-qualifications and the unit clubs. The NSDs will hit the road for the final push to seminar, so count on a few “events” to keep the old pot stirred. Use your listening skills and hear the omissions, exaggerations, inflations, religious abuse and materialism. It’s fun. Besides you have heard it all before. Or maybe not, “I stories” tend to get better and better with innumerable recitations.
June will be huge. There are all sorts of exciting products for you to order. Wow. Never mind that they are overpriced and all. It is just SO exciting. And your unit will be soooooooooo close to achieving some impossible goal, and it’s not about you, it’s about achieving the dream together… remember TEAM means “Together Each Achieves More,” and UNIT means “U ‘n I Together.”
So, you decide. You can read and react, or read and think. If there wasn’t just a little curiosity, you wouldn’t be lurking. We are not monsters, we are not victims. We were once as pink as you might still be, and we finally paid attention to the warning signs we used to blow by. We are paying it forward. It’s your turn to pay attention now.
Visit the
I’m still in my former director’s Facebook group, so I had to take a peek to see how the unit is tracking against the monthly production goals listed above. Currently, she’s a Grand Achiever, driving a Chevy Malibu. Last time I checked, she was hit or miss on making enough monthly production to avoid a copay, but her goal was to earn her Cadillac by Christmas.
August: $8,500 (copay on the Malibu)
September: $11,500
October: $9000 (whew! barely avoided the copay)
November: $13,300
December: $12,200 (Cadillac ain’t happening)
January: $3000 as of two days ago
She didn’t post numbers for July, just that it was “great.” Her current goal for the second half of the seminar year is to finish as a Circle of Achievement Unit with $300K wholesale by 6/30. To do this, her goal is $13,200 in wholesale production each month. Now I don’t claim to understand MK Math, but doesn’t $300K wholesale require an average production of $25K monthly? Also, $13.2K for the next 6 months, plus the $60K-ish that her unit has already done, gets her less than halfway to her goal.
Yet all of her posts are about the success of the unit, and when a goal is missed, it never gets mentioned again. If any lurkers are reading this, I encourage you to do the math. How successful is your unit, really?
“How successful is your unit, really?”
Spoiler alert: No MLM downline in any MLM since the beginning of time has been profitable as a whole. It is mathematically impossible for any pay-to-play endless-chain system (MLM, Pyramid Schemes, Ponzi Schemes) to be profitable. The downline always spends more than it makes, in aggregate. These losses are built into the scheme, and are the source for the meager profits for those on the very top.
No matter where you choose to measure the “top” of the downline (either an SD or a kingpin at the very top), from that point downward, the down-line is losing money as a whole. How can anyone take pride in running such a business? If the FTC required MLM reps to report their aggregate P&L to their down-line, this would quickly become clear. Every single one of these up-line reps would have a downline P&L in the red from the very start, and it will never, ever recover. And the more they make individually, the greater the losses below…by design. Bragging about profits in such a scheme is despicable.
The following model explains why pay-to-play endless-chain schemes must lose money as a whole. It’s the nature of the scheme.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiMLM/comments/d3rpcb/geometric_growth_is_impossible_in_mlm/
Doesn’t Mary Kay let double credit months count towards the Circle of Achievement but not the car?
Yes, yes it does. I wonder why that could be? Could it be that the car program actually has a cost to the company associated with it? And that those bills are not paid with imaginary sales? Could it be that Circle of Achievement is a meaningless accomplishment recognized only with a 50 cent sash and a stage walk that costs Corporate nothing? And that the more people achieve that “milestone” the more it fuels hope for the masses who are actually losing money on the hamster wheel? Food for thought.
In other words: trinkets are free, cars? not so much.
And yet they call it a “free car.”
Hmmmmmm…..
P.S.: …mmmmmm…
I’m fascinated by this word “production”. Can I get a few definitions of what it actually means? I’ll start:
Production – The amount of product Mary Kay Inc. can its direct buying customers to order.
Grrrr…..
can *get* its direct buying customers to order.
It’s not a “free” car lol. It’s earned usage Don cha know.