Q&A: What if my side hustle is actually a scheme?
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Everybody has a friend (or is the friend) who spent a summer in college selling knives, and it probably wasn’t a profitable use of daylight.
Despite their shady reputations, multi-level marketing companies like Cutco and Amway have drawn millions of participants looking for extra income for the better part of a century. In her new book Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, New York Magazine journalist Bridget Read investigates just that. Morning Brew chatted with her about the slippery slope from side hustle to potential scam.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Which came first, the side hustle or the MLM?
Side hustles were definitely already here, because as long as there’s been an economy, there have been people left out of it.
But multi-level marketing and the door-to-door selling industry that pre-dated it absolutely helped shape a culture that turns that marginalization into empowerment, this idea that, rather than it being a problem, that’s actually freedom—you’re free to work on your side hustle and then one day strike it rich.
I think we’ve all been exposed to MLM ideas, like a social safety net holding us back, or that we should all be our own little entrepreneurial empire operating alone and without protections.
So many more people used to have regular nine-to-five wage jobs, many of which had union benefits. Now, that’s more of a rarity, and I think MLMs certainly had a hand in that switch.
What conditions are ripe for MLMs to flourish?
When multi-level marketing was invented, postwar in 1945, there was this incredible sense of anxiety in the United States about how people would fit into this new world and whether the US would become prosperous. The industry has capitalized on that rhetoric at every turn.
When the economy fails, MLMers are out there saying, “You can’t trust the government. You can’t trust the sort of economy at large. You can’t trust jobs and the regular job market.”
What they provide, they say, is this way to do it yourself, where you don’t have to rely on these systems that are subject to the whims of some elite stockbroker. MLMs make it seem like you can avoid being buffeted around by these forces that are so outside of your control.
How do people get sucked into MLMs?
Some MLMs literally teach people to recruit using a prospect’s pain points—things in their life that are difficult—whether you have student debt, medical debt, or maybe you need a community.
You have people telling you to your face that they’re making money when they’re not. So if you’re surrounded by people who are supposedly doing well, I think you’d have to be really, really cynical—uniquely cynical—to just assume that all of those people are lying, especially if it’s somebody you met at church, a parent in your kid’s school, a friend, or a family member.
Content retrieved from: https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/05/18/q-a-what-if-my-side-hustle-is-a-scheme.
