You’d be amazed at the number of real-world ex-MLM members who say “I watched Leah Remini’s documentary on Scientology, and suddenly it clicked that, whoa, I was in a cult.” (Including Roberta Blevins, host of the Life After MLM podcast.)
Leah Remini also inspired the in-universe cult-survivor interview series mentioned in Slow News Day: Favorite Shows.
Juniper: Not grabbing anything from the pile for Leif?
Thorn: Nah. I’ll stick to things I feel comfortable actually buying . . . no offense.
Juniper: None taken — I get it. You’re staying all the way away from the cult.
Thorn: So, you think these are full-on corporate cults, huh?
Juniper: I mean — I don’t want to overstate the trauma, here? None of them are Northwind Prismaceuticals. The executives aren’t out there murdering people. That I know of.
But the support groups for ex-members, and their families and loved ones, do call them cults, yeah.
Thorn: Uh . . . you got any recs?
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Ok, so apparently I wasn’t my mother’s only son to not have a brush with cults. That said, I was really only looking into maybe being a “distributor” for that place to get a discount on exactly one <product type>. I can’t remember if it was the first night or second night that I decided it was super shady and I wasn’t going to get involved – but I kept going to the training until it was time to formally make the decision, because I wanted to know how much of a scam it was.
I mean, I don’t know that the MLM in question is necessarily that bad, but they were pretty clearly a MLM scam to sell fairly good <product type>. What I eventually did instead was get a competitor’s more advanced <product type>, as they are cleaner, quieter, cheaper, and less messy, both from a logistics perspective as well as a maintenance perspective.
I have to think that A: Thorn is looking into these groups due to his late mother, B: he’s guaranteed to run into his quasi-other-boyfriend, and C: the title “Leif and Thorn” is feeling increasingly obsolete.
I was assuming he was looking into them on Kale’s behalf in the first place. There’s no particular evidence that his mom was involved in a cult; she never seemed to stick with any one bad venture for long.
Yes, but any person that bounces from bad venture to bad venture is liable to be involved in a number of MLMs over the course of their string of bad decisions – generally right towards the end as they’re about to collapse. That’s the least profitable time to get involved with them, but also the easiest time to get out of them.
Note that doesn’t need to be the MLM as a whole collapsing, it could just be a local portion of it. I’m thinking of one in particular here, which somehow has stuck around an amazingly long time, but a lot of their local offices have not.
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