Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America

New York magazine journalist Read debuts with a penetrating exposé of multilevel marketing schemes. She recounts how in the 1940s, a pair of salesmen bitter about not receiving a larger cut of their hires’ commissions convinced struggling vitamin company Nutrilite to adopt the first MLM plan, removing limits “on how much of a cut a talented recruiter could take from all the people he brought in.” Exploring the heartbreaking consequences of such scams, Read tells how an Air Force veteran signed up to become an “independent beauty consultant” for Mary Kay cosmetics in 2013, kicking off a decade-long nightmare that saw her lose friends and spend more than $74,000 trying to meet unrealistic “sales” requirements. Read also highlights MLM’s overlooked role in conservative politics, describing how members of the DeVos and Van Andel families, founders of the household products MLM company Amway, have donated heavily to conservative candidates in exchange for favors and funded conservative think tanks to advance their anti-regulatory agenda. The perceptive analysis illuminates how MLM constitutes an unholy alliance of grift and the American bootstrapping ethos, making the persuasive case that the scheme “foreshadows the failure of a society that entrusts the care of its citizens, their independence, the administration of democracy itself to the forces of capitalism.” Readers will be rapt. Agent: Eryn Kalavsky, Salky Literary. (May)