No Secret to Mary Kay
The universe is going to get us for being so negative!
I’ve been in MK for 15 years and it’s been a very positive and totally enriching experience for me and my family as a single mom. It’s just too bad that you obviously have nothing better to do than send negativity out into the universe. With all that negativity going out there you will get it back. It’s called the Law of Cause and Effect, you’re making the cause and will get the effect.
I think your intent may be to help others but there is no secret to all that you’ve written. The marketing plan isn’t a pyramid because team building is a choice. Mary Kay Ash designed this business so that if all you wanted to do is make money from sales, you definitely could. It eliminates all the problems that come from consultants and directors from money problems.
You obviously don’t understand the concept of being your own retailer and providing immediate customer service to your customers. I’ve done it both ways by choice and spent too much time, energy and gas placing orders and setting up deliveries, then delivering product. When you tear apart the scripts, you’re tearing apart Mary Kay Ash’s own words of how to work in direct sales before she even created the company.
You know, Mary Kay, Inc. has no control over the few who have used this business for advancement using non-MK principles and have obviously somehow hurt or burned some people’s feelings, like yours. Neither do they have control over those like you, who trash the good that has come from this business.
It’s sad that you feel so strongly a need to use your time to perpetuating this negativity. Post this comment, won’t you? That would be being honest. Give a fair view of the whole picture.
Visit the
I’ve been in MK for 15 years and it’s been a very positive and totally enriching experience for me and my family as a single mom. {I hope for your kids’ sake you have another income stream. If you’re claiming MK is your only income and you make a living wage off of it, I won’t believe it without a tax return, including Schedule C. Don’t worry, Tracy will redact any sensitive info. Please be aware it’s liable to become a calendar holiday because it’s never happened before.}It’s just too bad that you obviously have nothing better to do than send negativity out into the universe. With all that negativity going out there you will get it back. It’s called the Law of Cause and Effect, you’re making the cause and will get the effect. {Gosh, it sounds like you’re really happy about the woo coming to bite us in the butt, which is negativity on your part. I hope you never have a plunger handy when you need one.}
The marketing plan isn’t a pyramid because team building is a choice. {Holy non sequitur, Batman. Also, corn kernels are botanically speaking fruits called caryopses. The marketing plan is a pyramid because those higher up make comissions based on inventory purchases by their downline, not from retail sales, period.} Mary Kay Ash designed this business so that if all you wanted to do is make money from sales, you definitely could. {Like even. Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash founded the company to put money into her pockets because she was a greedy person. The huns posting on Facebook about selling $100 in a week aren’t making bank by any stretch of the imagination.} It eliminates all the problems that come from consultants and directors from money problems. {I can’t parse this word salad, but there’s a whole lotta consultants and directors with money problems, as has been shown here repeatedly, with like math and stuff.}
You obviously don’t understand the concept of being your own retailer and providing immediate customer service to your customers. {Oh, for Crom’s sake, read the dang site and count the posters who were in MK for over a decade, including as directors, Cadillac drivers, and nearly NSDs. Not to mention those who have owned actual brick and mortar small businesses and worked in sales.} When you tear apart the scripts, you’re tearing apart Mary Kay Ash’s own words of how to work in direct sales before she even created the company. {Thats because Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash’s words boil down to “bilk money from those below you but call it a business opportunity, and say it’s their own fault if they fail.”}
You know, Mary Kay, Inc. has no control over the few who have used this business for advancement using non-MK principles and have obviously somehow hurt or burned some people’s feelings, like yours. {Nor do they have control over those who have used Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash’s principles to do a hell of a lot of harm, which is what this site is about.} Neither do they have control over those like you, who trash the good {such as…? Please be specific.} that has come from this business.
It’s sad that you feel so strongly a need to use your time to perpetuating this negativity. {Meanwhile, you’re just raking in the bucks while you’re giving us negativity about our “negativity, aren’t you?} Post this comment, won’t you? {Ever hear of being careful what you wish for?}
“The marketing plan isn’t a pyramid because team building is a choice.”
Being at the bottom of someone else’s pyramid does not eliminate the pyramid. Your qualifying minimum purchases (which are required to get your discount) are in place solely to power the pyramid above you, providing the recurring upward cash-flow that is emblematic of product-based pyramid schemes.
It’s not a choice when your fellow IBCs and upline WILL recruit your customers out from under you because if you’re not “sharing the opportunity” of selling Mary Kay, then any and everyone around you certainly can, and are encouraged to. So while you might “choose” to not build a team, your paying customers WILL be recruited into someone else’s downline, and you have no say about it.
20% of the content on this site is from pro-Mary Kay writers. Twenty. Per. Cent. And, yet, none of it has any substance. No one is convinced by it. No one on this site has had their life changed positively by the Friday Critics.
80% of the content on this site reveals the unvarnished truth of what is going on inside the Pink Fog(tm). That 80% has shown women how to recoup their losses by returning product. It has revealed that they are not alone in their struggles. It has created a welcoming community that doesn’t evaporate the moment you’re no longer financially benefitting us. It has given tactical steps for getting out of Mary Kay, getting away from toxic directors, and rebuilding life on your own values, not those force-fed you by the pink glitter squad.
As for me? I’ll stick with the Monday-Thursday crowd. But thanks for the negativity and shaming, OP. I’m sure that’s somewhere on your IPA tracker that you’re no doubt coloring in with discontinued lipstick.
20% of the articles might be from critics, but they all say the same few things over and over so the amount of actual content they generate is way, way lower. Whereas the rest of the articles are informative, from the heart, and educational.
I can’t see IPA without thinking of beer, and now I want a beer at 9 am 🙁 What the heck. Cheers to the Monday-Thursday crowd!
It’s five o’clock somewhere!
Lol this reminds me that while MK folks use wine or champagne glasses as vessels from which to enjoy mashed potatoes, WE know what such glasses are meant for and use them accordingly.
CHEERS!
I love a good mashed spud as much as anyone else but in a champagne coupe.. nah!
Yeah, mashed potatoes belong on a dish next to a big slab of meatloaf, smothered in gravy.
I admit I’ve eaten mashed potatoes (out of a very pretty, but pedestrian bowl from TJMaxx) while drinking wine (out of a large Yeti…I’ll splurge on my wine/vodka vessels). Does that count? A little? At the very least it qualifies as upscale white trash, no?
Hey, beer is definitely good and IPA is even better!
“When you tear apart the scripts, you’re tearing apart Mary Kay Ash’s own words of how to work in direct sales before she even created the company.”
Is Mary Kay Ash somehow infallible that if she can’t be criticized? It seems so many people in the pink bubble equate her with being their savior, her words are the standard to live by and she did no wrong. I don’t know if Mary Kay made the scripts I have read on here, but several of them I have read are designed to manipulate people in some way. Interviewing women to press for a hot button issue, encouraging women to hide ‘the business’ from their family (aka husband unawareness plan), manipulating friends and family to attend recruiting events, using God/faith to push for consultants to buy inventory or shame them for not succeeding, pushing a woman to make quick decisions about joining or buying inventory before she has had the chance to think it over and discuss with family, or hiding facts such as struggles to sell, extra expenses in the business and time commitments that are expected and so much more I have read in the scripts.
Also you can’t have all generals and no privates in the army or all CEOs and no workers in a company. A lot of people have to make up the base of the pyramid. Technically everybody has the ‘opportunity’ to build a team, but in reality only a very few are able to get several team members under them and make money from others ordering inventory.
“When you tear apart the scripts, you’re tearing apart Mary Kay Ash’s own words of how to work in direct sales before she even created the company.”
Hmm…what’s that whispering I hear?
Cult…cult…cult…cult
If you can truly make money in MK by not recruiting why won’t they let you sign up without an up line ?
Excellent question Parsonsgreen. Also, when you remove all the up-line commissions, the wholesale cost to the IBC drops dramatically, making is possible for an IBC to sell product at a competitive price, and thus have a chance to actually run a competitive retail business. Territorial protection would be the next pro-consultant change to make it possible to run a real retail business with Mary Kay products.
But not of this is what Mary Kay wants. All the incentives in Mary Kay are based on orders within the downline, not sales to outside folks. If Mary Kay wanted to compete in the open beauty products market, they would sell directly to customers on their web site and get rid of the expensive MLM distribution channel.
Having a huge network of consultomers allows Mary Kay to charge well above market value for product of marginal quality, with incentives for the consultomers to order way more product than they can ever use or sell. You will never get outside customers to over-order like consultomers do, nor will outside customers naturally choose to pay the outrageous prices Mary Kay gets out of their consultomers for the products.
So, given the choice between razor thin margins in a competitive marketplace, vs. huge margins to a captive audience that will over-order without using much of the product anyway, is it any surprise Mary Kay chooses the latter? Scruples (and reputational self respect) are what keep real businesses away from the very shady business of MLM. Remove the scruples, and MLM comes naturally to folks willing to exploit others for dishonest gain.
I’ve been in MK for 15 years and it’s been a very positive and totally enriching experience for me and my family as a single mom.
if you’ve been in 15 years, you must be a pretty high rank and a multi-caddy driver, yes?
I wonder what your children really think about it. There’s plenty of posters on r/antiMLM who are the children of long time MLMers who do not see their lives as being an enriching or positive due to the time and money suck that these companies are.
It’s just too bad that you obviously have nothing better to do than send negativity out into the universe. With all that negativity going out there you will get it back. It’s called the Law of Cause and Effect, you’re making the cause and will get the effect.
We are writing the truth. The truth isn’t negative. Just because (general) you doesn’t like the truth doesn’t change it.
I think your intent may be to help others but there is no secret to all that you’ve written.
Thanks, I think.
The marketing plan isn’t a pyramid because team building is a choice. Mary Kay Ash designed this business so that if all you wanted to do is make money from sales, you definitely could. It eliminates all the problems that come from consultants and directors from money problems.
Being at the bottom of a pyramid is still being in a pyramid. I suppose you can make money simply by selling but that doesn’t make money for the directors or the company long-term.
You obviously don’t understand the concept of being your own retailer and providing immediate customer service to your customers.
Patronising much. We live in an age of Amazon Prime, Door Dash and Uber Eats. Plus we can actually walk into shops and get what we want practically on the spot. So yes, we understand immediate customer service.
I’ve done it both ways by choice and spent too much time, energy and gas placing orders and setting up deliveries, then delivering product.
Sounds like you are not making a lot of profit then.
When you tear apart the scripts, you’re tearing apart Mary Kay Ash’s own words of how to work in direct sales before she even created the company.
It’s the words of Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash not scripture. We are allowed to point out errors in both and how they fail to account for life in the twenty-first century.
You know, Mary Kay, Inc. has no control over the few who have used this business for advancement using non-MK principles and have obviously somehow hurt or burned some people’s feelings, like yours.
Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash’s company an fire any member of it’s sales-force for any reason. So it does have control over how you work. Even if the action wasn’t while you “working your business”.
Neither do they have control over those like you, who trash the good that has come from this business.
Again, telling the truth and re-counting I-Stories isn’t trashing the company. Showing the kind of money made by advancing up the pyramid isn’t trashing the company. Looking at the propaganda published and dissecting it isn’t trashing the company.
It’s sad that you feel so strongly a need to use your time to perpetuating this negativity. Post this comment, won’t you? That would be being honest. Give a fair view of the whole picture.
Another Friday, another post of ” all sound and fury, signifying nothing”. You got what you wanted and been posted. I just wish you had used your time and energy actually defending something we got wrong rather than yet another “lazy looser” post.
You burned my feelings.
Here, I’ve got some aloe vera gel (from Target, not MK!)
Ridiculous downvote ™!
Also, are you following the Prince Harry/Meghan Markle debacle? If not just Google “Prince Harry frostbitten penis Elizabeth Arden cream”.
According to Harry, it’s the best choice for burns!
:O
Thank God that’s an injury I’ll never have to worry about!
“I think your intent may be to help others but there is no secret to all that you’ve written.”
Of course what we write isn’t a secret. The whole point of the site is to tell our stories and warn as many people as possible.
Hey, huns, tone policing victims isn’t a good look. Telling the truth doesn’t equal negativity. I feel like the “law of cause and effect” is a pseudoscience take on Newton’s third law of physics, but if we’re gonna go by your (lack of) logic, what is the effect of your scolding to people who are being “negative” about the Pink Bubble? Surely you’ll be receiving some kind of negativity for spreading more to us, right?
Mary Kay preaches “God First,” but seems to have appropriated paganism as their corporate religion. Because statements like “don’t send negativity out into the Universe, lest it turn back upon you” notion comes out of paganism, not the Bible.
There’s a loooong history of these hucksters:
Napoleon Hill, “Think and Grow Rich” (1937)
Norman Vincent Peale, “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952)
Rhonda Byrne. “The Secret” (2006)
Right on, Lazy Gardens!
15 years? You did t mention any of this, but what car are you currently driving? If it’s not a Cadillac, you gross less than $48,000/year. After 15 years, you gross less than $24/hr. And then you’ve got taxes to subtract off that and then expenses. Don’t forget your car co-payments. Or your suit, Leadership and Seminar trips. Postage. Website. Zoom subscription.
And, I’ll guarantee you this: After 15 years, you most certainly do not have benefits. Unlike nurses, teachers, and many other CAREERS, you have nothing at the end of 60 days. Miss production this month, and you’ve got until the end of March. And that’s that.