There is a ton of it where I live here in Utah and it has been that way for many years.
I have mixed feelings as some of the ideas and companies are kind of novel but the people at the "top" ultimately make boatloads of money with little work while the hopeful little guy at the bottom makes little money (relative to the top) yet does most of the overall work. It seems to me that it has much more to do with the money than the product.
An entrepreneurial young population and LDS(Mormon) culture and networking have set the stage for this. The focus on the business model rather than the quality or integrity of the product or service has tainted other historically professional endeavors as far as I'm concerned. Dentistry(my father was a 1950's trained dentist) is a fine example. It is very hard to come out of school, "hang your shingle" in an area of need and make a successful go of it based on word of mouth
and your reputation. It has been replaced by "buying in" to established practices that are basically "dentist mills" that rely heavily on aggressive advertising and "employ" heavily debt-ridden new grads. A friend of mine whose ton is training to be an oral surgeon told me that his son and his son's new wife are currently $875K in debt with still more training to go! After that, they will be "employed" in the Twin Cities area for ~4 years making money for those at the top and then will be able to "buy in" to their group at ~ $1,000,000. It's not exactly the same as MLM but still another business model the top of the chain really feeds off the bottom. In my mind it kind of taints a profession in the traditional sense, I guess I'm old fashioned, a poor businessman, or maybe both!!! I'm not starving though and enjoy my own old fashioned professional reputation.
I was flying to Ketchikan recently from SLC for a fishing trip when I listened to a "nice" middle aged woman from Petersburg visiting with a college aged girl flying to Seattle. At first it seemed she was genuinely interested in the young girl and her plans for the future asking all about her and then telling her about her life in Petersburg and her own life lessons learned. Then the conversation shifted to this neat, special company that she had joined forces with in Utah whose number one priority was to empower and improve peoples lives!!! Because this company was so great, they were also very successful... but that was not the primary focus!!! Would she like to know more about this wonderful company??? I had to tune her out at that point in time. She got the girl's contact information and it was over. I said hello to the young lady as we landed and had her tell me about the travel abroad trip she was taking... enough said.
I'm a skeptic but I am not as rich as many of these people and a little more old fashioned. Thankfully I can still afford the occasional fishing trip to Alaska (but I don't own the airline or the lodge!).
