In Conversation with Bridget Read

Bridget Read’s Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America is a queasy delight, documenting the rise of multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) from their origins in quack vitamin sales in the early 20th century up through Amway’s patriotic pitches for soap and Mary Kay’s pink Cadillacs. Pyramid schemes, or MLMs, are characterized by the creation of “downlines” — contra these companies’ marketing, the point is never really to sell your products to consumers of soap or cosmetics, but to recruit new sellers under you. Generally, each new seller is required to stock up on a bunch of the company’s product, and the person above them gets a cut of that sale. And on and on. In the world of MLMs, finding people to exploit below you is ennobled by prize ceremonies and special titles. In these stories, Bridget sees building blocks of right-wing ideology: propaganda for the entrepreneurial self and identification with elites. 

Before MLMs existed, there were door-to-door sales. Bridget shows how the direct selling industry pushed to exempt their workers from New Deal provisions, solidifying the independent contractor status that would become core to MLMs — and in which so many gig workers suffer today. “Calling people independent contractors is its own euphemism,” Bridget told me. “You know, ‘we’re not denigrated, we’re independent.’ It’s almost a special status to have side hustles and to build your little empire, and the book really traces how MLM pushed that ideology forward.” The families who created massive MLMs over the last century, like the DeVos and Van Andel clans of Amway, have become political powerhouses and wealthy donors to the right. 

Interwoven with Bridget’s investigations is the story of Monique, an army veteran who gets involved with Mary Kay for the camaraderie and the chance to be her own boss — only to find that ascendance in the business is not built on her sales to customers, but placing large Mary Kay orders on her own dime and recruiting women below her to do the same. Very few ever offload their products, the costs of her orders pile up without generating the promised wealth, and Monique ends up with nothing but debt. 

Bridget and I speak about the book below. If you’re in New York, join us next Friday night for a book chat and screening of the camp masterpiece Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay, in which Parker Posey confronts the MLM queen in a (sort of) true story of cutthroat cosmetic competition. —Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD Mary Kay looms large in your book — is the world of MLM primarily female?

BRIDGET READ When MLM starts, it’s white married couples striving to transform their class status after World War II. Then when women start entering the labor market by necessity, they do it in these insecure sectors of the economy — like retail service. They want to supplement their income while they’re doing childcare. That’s how women become the majority in MLM. 

SL It’s striking to me that these pyramid schemes started off with vitamin sales and have come to include companies like Herbalife, which sells supplements, Amway, which marketed soaps as organic, and Mary Kay, which promised self-improvement for women. It seems like there’s a sort of anti-expert, health-oriented undercurrent to the world of MLMs — very RFK Jr., very don’t trust the fluoride. 

BR Yes, it’s very MAHA. And of course women are playing a big role in all of this. RFK has this sort of trad wife army behind him. There’s a bit of the book where I write about an American tradition that’s called Mind Cure, or New Thought — a sort of American mysticism that says you can control your environment with your mind. A lot of the guys who created MLM were reading texts like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937) and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (1952). Peale ends up being pastor at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where Donald Trump goes as a kid. “Manifestation,” which is now obviously really popular on Instagram, is really old.

After the Civil War, as we transitioned into an industrial country, women had an identity crisis — those who were used to contributing to an agrarian household suddenly became workers or housewives. Middle class women who weren’t working sought purpose in securing the health of their children in a very individualist way, within the household. MAHA follows from this idea that if women were just allowed to do whatever they wanted, child health and education problems could be addressed. That’s where you get things like opposing pasteurization.

SL And buying supplements.

BR The first MLM product dating back to the 1920s was a vitamin. A huge reason for that was their lack of regulation — they could promise crazy things that could never be backed up. It was always about self-improvement. The way independent contractors exist in this unregulated space, rather than being employees — these sorts of products also thrive in an unregulated space. MLM always sells itself as a frontier where you can get in on the ground floor of a new expanding market. 

SL What are the class dynamics here? You have to have some money to buy into MLMs in the first place.

BR MLM has changed as the ability to spend has changed over the last three decades. Now, there are a lot more ways to go into debt. You can take out a home equity loan like someone tries to do in the book. Monique was a perfect target — people who are on fixed income, who are on disability or medical benefits or anything like that.

SL And it just sends more profit to the top.

BR When I went to the Mary Kay convention, the amount of money that had been spent by people in that room was staggering. Everyone’s giving away their money but also giving away their energy and themselves. If you could channel that sense of purpose into collective solidarity instead, you could get so much done. But they’re being told they can solve their personal problems by continuing to turn inward and continuing to improve themselves. And blame themselves for their problems. 

SL Well, it seems like MLMs tap into the existing suburban dream easily. It’s not very challenging to sell affluence and traditional femininity.

BR Yes: the idea that you can ascend to this bubble with your beautiful big marble kitchen counters and your kids and know that you’re going to be safe from the ills of society in your little world. The trick is that the bubble relies on the constant, growing mass of people who pay upward. It’s one of the problems with the abundance discourse right now — this fairy tale story of growth that says we can accomplish progressive goals without confronting what that means for capital. If you don’t confront these actors, it’s just another pyramid scheme.

SL It’s incredible propaganda for capitalism. And you make the case that understanding MLMs is key to understanding U.S. politics today — it’s not just the subtle ideology being transmitted in this notion of being your own boss. The people behind MLMs also have an explicit political project.

BR The Amway founders and their families fund free market think tanks and so on. The most influential right now is the Heritage Foundation; Barb Van Andel-Gaby of the Van Andels is chair of the board. Their political aims were in Project 2025, being enacted by Elon Musk, by DOGE, by agency heads installed by the Trump administration. They’re most interested in deregulation, getting rid of consumer protection organizations, trying to defang the FTC, the actual agencies that go after MLM companies and other financial frauds. 

They also want to expand the definition of “independent contractor” in order to expand the number of workers who are outside the meager protections that we do have. It creates this incredibly dark funnel into desperate precarity — and then into the “get rich quick” type of work that MLM pretends to be.

On the gender front, they’re promoting Judeo-Chrstian values and the nuclear family not just as a moral unit in the United States, but also as the working unit, the business unit. The Heritage Foundation, for example, wants to loosen child labor laws. They want to create these little kingdoms of small entrepreneurial families where no one is involved in the welfare state at any point because they’re not working for an employer that pays income or payroll tax on them. It’s this weird wild West where no one actually has a stake in anyone else’s fate. 

SL Can you tell us a little about the film we’ll be screening in New York next Friday?

BR It’s really fun. Very much Mary Kay propaganda. Much of it is total lies. But it’s about this particular real life conflict with another MLM company, girl boss versus girl boss. On the one hand, the film is trying to do something interesting with Mary Kay’s life — she always avoided the appearance of conflict or anything negative. But in the end, her true triumph is when she’s shown to be the better businesswoman by taking Parker Posey’s character down. It’s very 2000s. You do have to see it.