Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America - Bridget Read
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Written by
Read by Nikki Massoud
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged
Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
Release date: 05-06-25
A “gripping” (The Washington Post) work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society.
“Reads like a thriller . . . masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM.
Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality.
In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos. Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn.
A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.
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| Creation Date: | Wed, 25 Jun 2025 01:40:24 +0200 |
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| Bridget Read - Little Bosses Everywhere.m4b 318.99 MBs | |
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| Combined File Size: | 319.23 MBs |
| Piece Size: | 256 KBs |
| Comment: | Updated by AudioBook Bay |
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This post has 6 comments with rating of 3/5
June 29th, 2025
Just from reading the background of the book, it seems Read does not know what she is even talking about. I guess she decided it was too tough to do, and now wants to bash the whole industry. I doubt she has ever met anyone truly successful. But it is an easy target, and you can get AI to write whatever you want it to write. Find the good or the bad so that I can write a book about it.
August 12th, 2025
Great quality audio and great book. Really heartbreaking to see the long history of MLMs ruining lives, and scary to learn about how companies like Amway have shaped the political landscape of the US to be so terrible.
April 18th, 2026
Abreader231, your comment is a gem. You criticize the author for not making the effort to know what she’s talking about. Yet you acknowledge that you only read the background info regarding the book, which probably means you skimmed this page. And, at one point you state that the author has probably not even met anyone who is successful. I’d say that Bridget Read is almost as successful as one can be in journalism and nonfiction writing: she supports herself in Brooklyn as a features writer for New York magazine, and this book received tremendous acclaim including a long positive book review by Corey Doctorow in the New Yorker. Lastly I must say I find it sadly ironic that you obviously believe that “success” is a reflection of one’s merit and hard work, yet you are writing comments on a website which is entirely dedicated to distributing stolen goods for people who don’t want to pay or can’t afford pay. I’m guessing that by your standards, someone who is successful would consider an audible subscription & or other audiobook expenses for themselves as mere pennies. (And yeah, I realize this is a late post. I happily found this book while searching for another, one by David Griscom about the radical history of Texas)
April 18th, 2026
Abreader231, It’s also sadly ironic that you seem to believe that success comes from following the rules and doing the right thing (like not using pyramid schemes). Yet again, you are a logged in member of a website supporting the theft of other people’s work, so you can get audiobooks without paying. Your hypocrisy would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and blind to itself
April 18th, 2026
And yes, I’m a logged in number of this website too. If I were financially successful, I wouldn’t be here. But my life was derailed by undiagnosed celiac disease (due to the disease itself I couldn’t hold jobs long enough to access medical insurance long enough to get beyond referrals for initial tests), and tragically, due to my own embarrassment and shame of the symptoms in grad school, I didn’t go to the student health center(and the naive belief that they were only good for prescribing antibiotics …which was a really dumb assumption). In my late 20s, I developed addictions to alcohol and heroin — the latter allowed me to kick the former with ease, and blocked the celiac symptoms. Methadone later took care of both those addictions, but had side effects that were not known when I started it, which stalled my life for several years. I am now approaching retirement age living off a low paying job, sometimes food benefits, and hopefully public housing in the near future. So I know why I’m on here: I’m not successful financially. How about you?
April 18th, 2026
PS: I still take methadone with my morning coffee, along with Wellbutrin, and those things lead me to sharing TMI. And dang it, I can’t seem to edit delete my comment🤷
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