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Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies

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139 points cdepman | 3 comments | 18 Jul 20 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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bcatanzaro ◴[18 Jul 20 17:10 UTC] No.23882880[source]▶
Stay-at-home moms are another big reason for this besides the missionary experience. It is very common for Utah Mormon women to stay at home raising children.

The traditional full-time workplace totally disrespects that choice. SAHMs are not compensated for the hard work they do. It makes sense they would look for something part time to do to make a little money and think about something besides kids. But how can they do that in the traditional American workplace that expects 40+ hours a week and a resume with no gaps?

Many MLMs are built for SAHMs. They build on SAHM social networks and many of them are explicitly about making domestic life more bearable (kitchen gadgets, home goods, clothes, beauty and health products).

I think there’s a story here about SAHMs as a neglected overlooked and disrespected population, and how MLMs fill a need for them.

BTW, I hate MLMs generally, I’m just pointing out that Mormon missionary service isn’t the only thing attracting MLMs to Utah.

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langitbiru ◴[18 Jul 20 17:49 UTC] No.23883198[source]▶
We should have part-time remote jobs (20 hours per week). Something like maintaining WordPress website or designing mock-ups with Sketch. Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.
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zozbot234 ◴[18 Jul 20 17:57 UTC] No.23883281[source]▶
> Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.

MTurk is basically this, so they're far from "rare". They're just not very interesting for first-world workers.

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1. ineedasername ◴[18 Jul 20 18:10 UTC] No.23883417[source]▶
A big part of why they're not interesting is because they generally pay a small fraction of minimum wage. The median is about $2 an hour. So I don't think MTurk serves as an adequate example of the type of job the op referenced.
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2. rrrrrrrrrrrryan ◴[18 Jul 20 18:31 UTC] No.23883613[source]▶
Much of the work done by stay at home moms pays less than minimum wage, though: Etsy stores, clipping coupons / general penny pinching, these MLMs.

I do think that the main difference is that the mechanical Turk work is just soul-crushingly boring.

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3. ineedasername ◴[20 Jul 20 23:35 UTC] No.23902997[source]▶
Clipping coupons is soul crushingly boring as well. I also run an Etsy store as a side activity and make about $25 per hour, 5-10 hours a week. Median for all Etsy is still about minimum wage, which, again, is significantly better than MTurk @ $2 an hour. And I'd argue the high volume low margin work for Etsy stores looks every but as soul crushing.