Corporate America Supplement Companies a Pyramid Scheme?

There are going to be quite a few people pissed off over my take on this, but it’s the way I see things and my experience from being in the industry for over a decade. As some of you know, I worked for a very large supplement company. My time with the company was spent growing their mid-Atlantic territory until I was handed a role running their Team Sports division and worked with college and professional sports teams. During my time there, I noticed a few things that I truly didn’t agree with and rubbed me the wrong way, which ultimately got me thinking about things. Are corporate America supplement companies really a pyramid scheme.

I make money for you, not the other way around

The thought of spending days at a time away from home building a territory at first didn’t seem like such a bad gig. Until I realized that I was away from home more than I was home each week — paying a mortgage on a home I never seemed to be at. Sure, I signed up to oversee nearly 10 states when I first began, and then I noticed something that truly bothered me. The money I made the company also paid other people who had nothing to do with my sales, who got to go home every night and sleep in their own bed. So, in essence, I was helping pay commission to people who did nothing to earn it, including my boss.

While I enjoyed my time working for one of these corporate America supplement companies, I was quickly becoming jaded knowing that teammates who made zero sales were collecting commissions off of my sales when in return, I was supposed to make some off of theirs and there were none. I was working hard while others were sitting around with their thumb up their ass. This got me thinking about MLM companies and pyramid schemes. The below and what I’m talking about in this article isn’t just the company I worked for, but can be said about many other companies out there structured the same way from all sorts of industries.



How the pyramid works

At the very bottom of the pyramid are the hard-working grunt employees. They are generally the sales team who goes out and are given their marching orders in terms of what areas need to be focused on during a given week and where to focus their efforts in order to grow the company and then report back on how their week went through a report every Friday. These individuals at the lowest level of the pyramid have a snowballs chance in hell of ever working their way up to becoming CEO, so essentially their potential to grow within the company is somewhat capped. Now mind you, these individuals either have a low base salary with commission, or are commission only. What happens up top does not filter down to this level. They money stays up top. Oh, and by the way, this level generally fills the pocket of those in the upper levels of the “pyramid.” As if they weren’t already sitting comfy with their salaried income.


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Matt Weik

Matt Weik, BS, CPT, CSCS, CSN, is the Owner and Head Keyboard Banger of Weik Fitness. He is a well-respected, prolific writer with a global following and a self-proclaimed fitness and supplement nerd. Matt’s content has been featured on thousands of websites, 100+ magazines, and he has authored over a dozen published books.