Why do people join MLMs?

The people I've known who have joined various MLMs over the years all seem to be doing it because they are lured by the promise of having something resembling your own business without having to bother with the parts of having your own business that suck.

I view it as a variant of the lure of the get-rich-quick scheme.

Like other commenters, I've known a couple of people who got sucked into MLMs because of the promise (either real or imagined) of making a lot of money on the side without doing too much work. It never happened that way, though.

I’ve had many friends who were into right-wing politics who got attracted to Amway. For instance a childhood friend in the 1980s had parents who were trying to get vouchers or a tax break for sending kids to private school and we’d go visit people who lived at Hampton beach and would drive down to Massachusetts to picket abortion clinics. They tried to get my parents to join Amway.

Another friend was a leader in the College Republicans in the early 1990s and a member of the John Birch society. He “drew circles” to show me how many people got a cut when I bought a $7 tube of toothpaste and concluded with “How does Amway deliver a great product at a low price? [taps presentation board with stick] By eliminating the middleman!”

Amway has always targeted this demographic and I’d say it has the ideological function of vaporizing private enterprise and pushing the idea that anybody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps but the reality is that it is more unequal than the economy as a whole because only a tiny fraction of people can make a profit in Amway.

There are other MLMs, particularly those who recruit women, who have different appeals.