The more friends you have, the more likely someone you know will eventually get sucked into a multilevel marketing scheme and start asking you to attend parties to celebrate the guilt-based selling of overpriced household items, magical healing juice, cooking utensils or other annoyances. The business model for these scamtastic enterprises is built on recruiting other saps to sell products as part of your team, as well as getting them to find other victims, even if it requires them to exploit friends and family.

Consumerism Commentary recommends some methods of avoiding becoming a part of MLM zombies’ shenanigans:

* Say you want to keep business out of your relationship. Your friend/salesman might try to use your shared history as a bargaining chip, and you can turn that around on them by declaring you value your relationship so much that you’d rather keep business out of it.

* Be firm, and don’t worry about losing a friendship. A driven salesperson sees a half-hearted “no” as a delayed “yes.” Snuff out any hope of ever selling you, and don’t let the fear that the friend will no longer talk to you if you turn him down play into your decision. If a friendship requires payment, it’s not a friendship.

* If you go to a party, leave your money at home. Don’t bring credit cards, checkbooks or cash. That way you can avoid any hard-sell tactics but still show a measure of support, if you must.

When Your Friends Become Social Sellers and Multi-Level Marketers [Consumerism Commentary]

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