re: John Oliver's takedown on MLM's

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Define unsustainable. The newer participants go into debt taking on inventory worth a fraction of the purchase price - and to get money back you have to rope friends or family into the same unsustainable situation. The nature of math (and limited number of people on earth) make it impossible for the next level or two of people to even break even either. None of that seems sustainable for the participants anywhere other than at the top. If you want to argue it is sustainable because the guys at the top make money? Well... that's only true in the sense that a con man also operates a sustainable business when he moves from town to town looking for new marks.

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Hell, just do the math when you divide the company's annual revenue and the number of "distributors" in said company. Supposedly Herbalife is in the ballpark of $3.5 billion annually, and have approx 3.5 million worldwide distributors. Straight up, that comes out to $1000/yr per person, and that doesn't include the money that they spent back into the company (often exceeding that amount), nor does it include the salaries of the CEO and the other 7,000 salaried employees. So that $1000 number is actually a generous estimate. Some make more than that, alot more make less...but if time is money, it's pretty clear that this is a big waste of time for 97% of the people involved.

Not sure why people get so fixated on the "$3.5 billion" stat, without looking at how many people were necessary to accomplish that....