Mary Kay Recruiters Consistently Lie About Everything. True or False?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I posted this question, "Is Mary Kay an illegal pyramid scheme? Will the results of the Y.T.B. lawsuit change things for Mary Kay?".

While there were many good responses, yesterday someone saw fit to go through all the trouble to create a blogger profile just so they could "flame" this site with Pink Truth propaganda.

It went something like this.

"Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that getting into Mary Kay Cosmetics is extremely dangerous! Recruiters consistently lie about everything, and the lies are perpetuated over and over:
"MK marketing plan taught at Harvard" NOT!!!!
"MK is a dual-marketing plan" NOT!!!
"Executive income on part-time hours" NOT!!!!
"You can write off your personal use of products as advertisement" NOT!!!!
Make no mistake that MKC is a devious, corrupt company whose catchy motto "Enriching Womens' Lives" is anything but! Thousands upon thousands of womens'lives have been destroyed by following the advice and business practices handed down from their uplines: divorce (their widely taught "husband unawareness program"), foreclosures (ordering incentives and "short-term loss for long-term gain"), and bankruptcy ("fake it till you make it").
Beware! Mary Kay Cosmetics preys on womens' natural trust.
If this lawsuit being discussed here rests upon the fact that their salesforce consistantly lie about the "flopportunity", then yes, MKC will be next. And for the sake of innocent women, I truly hope it will."

As I suspected, the cowardly deviant had no designs to stick around and explain his/her position, much less defend it.

However, and I am sure quite opposite the expectations of aforementioned deviant, I would like to discuss this further.

Since this seems to mirror somewhat accurately the complaints and missives of the Pink Truth crowd, this is a great opportunity for the "balanced" crowd to respond.

What say all of you? Are these rantings valid? Have you seen any of these things take place?

To Raisinberry.

Recently Pink Truth posted a VERY long article by one calling herself “raisinberry”. The article was called, “If truth is truth” and presented the question that is on very many people’s mind. Is what I am experiencing (or experienced) in Mary Kay the norm, or an aberration? She then lists her story in great detail. If you are not a regular on PT, I recommend that you go read it. It is well written and without reading it, you may not understand this post. You can read it here.

I have read her post several times and what follows is my response. It is not complete by any means, but I think the important things are covered. At the end, you will see an invitation to not only Raisinberry, but to any who genuinely want to ascertain and typify the Mary Kay experience and are willing to join this site in doing so. I emphasize that here because if you are not interested in everything that I have to say, I would like to at least know that you got the invitation to post what YOU have to say. I GREATLY value the opinion of anyone that posts here. Please feel free to join us. That said, let’s get into it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the new format here, you can click on the link below to open the rest of this post in another window, or you can click on the title of the post to open the rest in the same window.




Raisinberry,

What is truth?

You ask, “If truth is truth, why are there sides to the Mary Kay issue?”

I ask you; to what truth are you referring?

Are you referring to absolute truth? Some say there is no such thing.

Are you referring to YOUR truth? If so, your truth is not my truth and so, truth (in this case) is NOT truth.

I assume that you ARE referring to absolute truth. Absolute truth IS truth, no matter what situation you are talking about. But to say that anyone holds the absolute truth regarding the Mary Kay opportunity is unreasonable at best. (Am I right?)

Without getting into a philosophical discussion about what defines truth, I will agree with you that it is important to find some way of discovering what the normal or at least average experience is in Mary Kay. (Do we agree?)

Is what you experienced the norm while my wife, her director, and the handful posting here on this site the aberration?

OR

Is what they experienced the norm while you and your PT friends are the aberration?

One of the major problems with undertaking that sort of evaluation is that no two people’s experience will be exactly alike. Some loved the product but hated the way they were asked to dress. Some hated the product but loved the “culture”. Some love everything and just accept that their director is a little psycho. Some are having a great time just buying enough to stay active and distributing it to their friends and family as gifts. This creates a VERY big problem in typifying the experience one will have. (Do we agree?)

If we were to take only people that were interested in the career path we would still have a massive problem with setting a standard of expectation. Some people have moral integrity so stiff that you would swear that if they found a penny on the ground they would not rest until they found the owner. Others are so suggestible that you could convince them that even though corporate says, “don’t sell in a retail setting” they really mean you should rent a store-front and set up shop. (Do we still agree?)

Your experience tells us that some people can be conned AND convinced to con others. Unfortunately, the definition of a “bad” experience and that of a “good” experience will not be uniform. Many people that have said, “I love Mary Kay” have been told they are wrong. Many that have said, “I hate Mary Kay” have been told it was their own fault. This creates a problem if we are to evaluate the norm of an experience based on opinions of people we don’t believe. You don’t believe us. It is hard for us to believe you when you post good advice on PT and call it bad. This makes it even harder for us to believe you when you talk about stuff that happened when you were in MK. (Did I lose you?)

You yourself have said, “We’ll be seeing you pro-MKers on PinkTruth real soon.” I am sure you remember that. You obviously don’t believe that there is a possibility that some of us will not be joining your ranks. The fact that you (and others) cannot acknowledge the possibility that some people were able to rise through the ranks with integrity and keep their values intact causes your opinions to lose a LOT of credibility. The fact that you think a “number one” brand should not need to change their product line makes many of us wonder if the things you perceived as “bad” were really bad or just something YOU didn’t like. (Do you see the problem there?)

I presume that by posting your experience you are proposing that it should be the test case for finding common ground?

How do you expect people to respond to you? You know they are not allowed to (unless they agree) on the site you posted it on. You can see that some people have already responded here on this site. I don’t see any responses from you or others on PT here (except Judi…again thank you Judi. We all love your perspective here!) How would you propose we create this “common ground”? (I am really asking)

I cannot and will not create a response to every point you make. I am sure that some of your experiences are universal, while some were unique to you, and the rest were somewhere in the middle.

However, even if we got the full participation of everyone that has ever “spoken their peace” about Mary Kay on the internet, I am sure that we would still not be able to accurately ascertain what the “real world” ratios are. 700,000 in MK in America? That is a lot. How could I take even 7,000 people that happened to log on to the hypothetical neutral “battlefield” as a significant sample? How many thousands of IBC’s just love their business and are blissfully unaware of the “battle” on the internet? How many irritated former consultants could care less? (still tracking?)

While it may be futile to try to accurately demonstrate the “common experience” that one is guaranteed to have in MK (impossible, no?), it is not futile to create a guideline of sorts that prepares anyone going into MK with a way of enjoying their experience and arming them with a plan for success. It is also not futile to create a list of things that directors should avoid in case some have lost their way and want to get back on track. (have I lost some?)

Throw out the “Everyone is going to get rich quick with Mary Kay” and the “Everyone that joins Mary Kay will be destroyed or destroy many” extremists and present an objective view of what Mary Kay looks like. (oh wait, that is why I started this site!)

Now if you are in either of those extreme groups, I am not going to throw you out… but neither will I afford your extreme views the kind of validity that you would hope I would. (sorry, trying to build something neutral here)

You (Raisinberry) say you are looking for a place that offers “a way to test the waters and see if what we have experienced in Mary Kay is actually a norm or some aberration”? I present to you, this site. (Have you seen it yet?)

Do you really want to know what the typical experience is? Or have you decided that your experience is universal enough to condemn and accuse all Mary Kay Independent Beauty Consultants of being the same as you (were)? (I suspect the latter)

Prove me wrong by posting here. Prove me wrong by telling people on Pink Truth where they can find this site. Prove me wrong by doing things that will actually result in an upfront and frank conversation about peoples experience and maybe lead to some discovery. Otherwise, I will continue assuming that you really have no interest in the truth. You will force me to continue believing that all you are interested in is declaring that YOUR point of view is the truth.

All others, (“lurkers” As I believe you would refer to yourself) jump on in. You can expect that we will ask questions about your experience. We would love it if you answer those questions. Sometimes the same experience can be positive or negative depending on how it is viewed. My parents used to physically discipline me. (I know some of you will agree with or disagree with this practice, try to see past that) I HATED it. I was convinced they hated me. I was convinced that I was a victim. Had the attention given to child abuse now, been around then, I may have tried to use that against them. Looking back now though, I realize they really had MY best interest in mind, not theirs.

It will not always be the case, but sometimes a director offering incentives for ordering is REALLY just offering a SALES incentive. My wife’s director (as I mentioned) and other directors on this site, have testified that they are very attentive to making sure their consultants don’t order inventory they aren’t selling just to “win” prizes. Some of them are initially hated for THIS because the consultant feels they are getting “picked on”. I think if I were in that situation (I was the director and I was trying to help someone by telling them to sell some of their inventory before purchasing more, and their response was one of indignation and “how dare you”), I might just say, “Ok, go ahead, buy as much as you want. I will give you the prize.”

It is indeed hard to accept a statement like, “My director never trains me” without asking what you have done to get training. Do you call and ask questions? Do you participate in the conference call? Do you take advantage of the opportunities to go warm chattering with someone that is really good at it? So, we may ask questions like that. It is not an attempt to disqualify your statement.

We DO want to validate or invalidate it. If you say, “my director never trains me” and follow it with, “I called her every day and she said, “show up to go up”, none of my sister consultants went warm chattering, they just talked about doing it, and my unit does not have a conference call”, we can say VALID! You were in a “no win” or at least difficult situation.

If you say, “No, I never called my director and ignored her calls when she called me, I hated warm chattering so I didn’t go, and I didn’t like being on the phone for 45 minutes every week for a conference call”, we might say that it was not your director that was not offering training, but you who didn’t accept the training. There are still many more variables, and so, more questions may follow. What we are trying to do here is create a template of sorts that can serve as a way of passing on accurate iterations of our experiences. For some it will be a caution. For others it will serve as advice.

So, once again, I invite all to post here. Let’s get the conversation started. It is a fact that Pink Truth will not allow people to post anything on that site that is evidence against what they claim is the truth. If you want to explore with us BOTH sides of the Mary Kay experience, we enthusiastically welcome you here.

Come one, come all.