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Everyone’s had a bad boss at some point or another, but the great promise of multi-level marketing (MLM), as New York magazine features writer—and former Vogue culture writer!—Bridget Read explains it in her new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (out May 6 from Crown), is this: What if you had the opportunity to be your very own bad boss, or eventually even someone else’s?
In a country where the future of organized labor is increasingly at risk, it’s not hard to understand why someone might be coaxed to jump into an ideal-seeming new work opportunity—even if the details don’t quite add up. According to the Federal Trade Commission, at least 99% of people who join MLMs don’t make any money, though their allure remains.
Here, Vogue spoke to Read about just what makes MLMs so seductive, the effect of the global economy on MLM recruitment, what she learned from spending time with people who had lost most of their money to MLMs, and more.
Vogue: What was the process of putting this book together like?
Bridget Read: I wrote a short article about MLMs for New York magazine in 2021 that was basically about how women were particularly affected and drawn to MLMs during the pandemic. So many things about MLMs were so confusing, and I just had to breeze by them in order to write the article. When I started digging, I was sort of mesmerized by how this thing could be legal, and then it became very clear that this had to be a book, because the story is just too big for one article or movie and it really is a story that tracks along the last century of American history. It was sort of equal parts contemporary reporting on how MLMs work and on what the MLM landscape is now and what it was then. There’s really very little journalism on the origins of MLMs, so I was starting from scratch in a lot of ways, answering some of those mysterious questions of, Who invented this and why, and who is operating this?
How did you prepare to connect emotionally with the interview subjects in the book, some of whom lost everything?
One thing I wanted to get into was the granularity of what it actually takes to get into multi-level marketing, which is why I talked to a lot of people who have lost a lot of money in MLMs. I spent significant time with a few people, getting incredibly deep on the exact mechanics of what it’s like to work in one of these companies, because I really wanted people to understand that it’s not as easy as going to some county fair and getting sold magic beans by some quack and losing all your money. When MLMs recruit you nowadays, they have very sophisticated podcasts and books and brochures that are very persuasive. There’s a myth that MLMs go after people who are followers or people who don’t ask questions, but they actually have real methods of making sure their answers to your questions don’t give you pause, right? For every question of, Why am I losing so much money?, it’s, Oh, you have to invest to get a return.
I wanted the book to be humanizing, because I think any American can relate to the idea that there’s so much about how we live that feels unfair. It’s like, I’m paying rent, I’m working a job, I’m paying into my 401K, but am I ever going to be able to take care of this medical debt or student debt or retire? This is a feeling a lot of people can relate to that’s not just unique to MLMs. There are so many ways that MLMs nowadays look just like other businesses that have been normalized by celebrities and on social media, so it’s even harder not to get sucked in. I approached it just being open to learning about the process. MLMs are so underreported-about that people really just appreciated talking about their experience.
Do you think “MLM brain” is going to get worse as the economy craters?
Historically, MLMs came out of the tail end of the Depression, right before the postwar era ended—so in that transition when people were coming out of a really hard time and looking toward all these really positive ideas about American abundance and prosperity and wealth. That pattern continued on through the economic crises of the 1970s and of periods in the ’90s, and then certainly during the financial crisis of the Great Recession. There are all these different affiliate-marketing and coaching systems now where people are just sharing the opportunity, but there s not a real market—they’re just roping other people in, right? I mean, when the president of the United States is promoting his own meme coin, that kind of tells us something.
Do you think there’s a tiny little bad boss in all of us?
That’s such an interesting question, because I do think what has emerged as an ideological movement over the last 50 to 80 years is the turning of a lot of people into greedy bosses. In the structure of our society, the people at the top have exponentially more than the people at the bottom; that’s the shape of a pyramid scheme, but it’s also increasingly the shape of the United States and of the world, frankly. What MLM did was help turn those hearts and minds so that when we see that level of inequality, instead of saying, “Hey, this seems unfair,” we say, “I want to be that person one day.” That’s the pitch of the multi-level market.
In reporting the book, I spoke to so many people who eventually decided to reject that notion that the best way to live your life and the best way to be a person in society is to be a boss or to have underlings, so I also feel hopeful about the capacity of people to understand when they’re being exploited and say, “I’m not going to do that to someone else.” I do see a world of bad little bosses, but I also hope that we can decide on an alternate way of thinking about what it means to be valuable in the world.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
