You Can’t Sell From An Empty Wagon
How MLMs manipulate you into being their real customer
There are the MLMs that expect you to carry inventory and those that will tell you it isn’t necessary or it's even prohibited. I’ve been in both. Mary Kay, the company that expects you to have inventory has an adage that they probably still use today: you can’t sell from an empty wagon. After three rounds as a consultant in two different MLMs, I understand now that this is both true and false. Ultimately, this is a manipulation.
Can you sell from an empty wagon? When the first MLMs came on the scene, well before I was even born, I suspect it was more difficult if you didn’t have inventory. If you were going door to door or selling at a party, you wanted people to take items home. I suspect these companies may have had fewer items to sell or had a slower turnover of discontinued items. Still, some people must have been willing to wait for their products to be delivered. If you were selling something like Tupperware, it would be difficult to anticipate what everyone wanted so you could have that much on hand.
These days, I think people are willing to wait. I’m used to ordering online and waiting a few days for a box to deliver my items for me. I don’t care about a personal touch. Even when I was still supporting MLM businesses like Origami Owl, I would try to get around having to find a consultant by buying right from the company’s webpage only to find out that I had been assigned to a consultant who now wanted to engage with me. Even Lularoe pushed consultants to sell through social media parties which meant you would have to wait for something to be shipped to you.
Mary Kay insists you need to have inventory for a successful business. They have tiers of how much you should buy, encouraging you to buy more so that you can anticipate anyone’s needs. They turn their consultant into the customer. Who cares that you may never have a customer let alone one who needs such a specific shade of eyeshadow. You don’t want any customer to wait. They told us this story about how someone would call them up and tell them how they were desperate to get their hands on this specific color of foundation NOW! The urgency of the story, the pretend customer, could be felt through the room. Nobody ever came back to me looking for more of anything at the last minute. I suspect it only happened in someone’s fantasy.
You would think Mary Kay wouldn’t care about what you do with your inventory. They care quite a bit and have plenty of restrictions about how you can sell to customers. You can’t sell it on eBay or other online retailers. Even when I was selling it, this was a problem. Plenty of consultants tried and then lost their ‘businesses’. Mary Kay corporate. When you’re struggling to sell they encourage you to build up your inventory and to take on debt to do so. For example, get a bank loan. BUT! You have to buy the biggest inventory package because banks won’t give you a loan below $2,000 according to these documents.
In Thirty-One Gifts, we were told we didn’t need inventory. That was one of the reasons I was excited at the time. I could buy my kit and have enough to do a few shows or keep it for myself. The kit you buy to join isn’t for you to sell. It’s for you to showcase at parties. It seemed like it was my choice to buy more. I wanted to have more examples at parties or to be seen around town with my bags so people would ask me where I could get it. You also earn free items. They’re only free until you have to pay your taxes and then they are counted as your income. With the frequency that they discontinue patterns and products, your initial kit will probably be out of date within a year. If you don’t order enough to get a prize for free, you then have to buy it if you want to showcase it at parties. One way or another you end up with unwanted and unused products.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if your MLM wants you to buy inventory or not. You will, ultimately have some. At least Mary Kay wanted you to sell it, rather than hoard it for yourself. At least they kept their product line fairly constant even if your product could expire before you sold it. Either way, I was more of a customer for these MLMs than I was a consultant to sell them. It took me days after leaving Mary Kay to walk away. Their buy-back policy at the time allowed me to box up nearly everything and send it back. With Thirty-One Gifts it took me months as I tried to recoup some cost by selling the unexpected inventory I had accumulated.
Can I sell from an empty wagon? Sure, but am I positive it's really empty? Isn’t that my own personal product sitting there, already unsellable?
