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.
“[A] deeply reported thrill ride–slash–horror story. This book is fascinating. And scary as hell.”—Vulture
“Gripping and instructive. . . . Lucid and engaging . . . . [Bridget Read] sketches a vivid portrait of a cultish culture.”—The Washington Post
“Fascinating. . . . Read upends everything we thought we knew about multilevel marketing. . . . It may be nonfiction, but Little Bosses Everywhere reads like a work of narrative fiction.”—Katie Couric Media
“Crucially—and what sets Little Bosses Everywhere apart from the myriad individual company exposés in print and film over the past few years—Read tells the whole story of the industry, digging into its origins to explain how it morphed into what it is today.”—The A.V. Club
“Comprehensive, engaging, and truly illuminating.”—Literary Hub
“Little Bosses Everywhere is an endlessly entertaining and eye-opening exploration of the dark side of the American dream. Before spending a dime on anything else, read this to understand the most seductive and corrosive aspects of our get-rich-quick culture.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road
“Read is unsparing in her deeply reported examination of how multilevel marketing is an American disease billed as a cure, hooking Americans (especially women) seeking stability and purpose with hollow promises of fast money. Grounded in history and a biting structural critique of country and capitalism, Little Bosses Everywhere is enraging and elucidating; it’s also a terrific and entertaining story. This is an important book.”—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad
“A lively, thorough investigation of the alarmingly American multilevel marketing industrial complex, from sketchy juice shops all the way to the White House.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto
“You’ve surely wondered how in the hell Donald Trump’s MAGA movement managed to take power in the United States. Incredibly valuable and grimly entertaining, Little Bosses Everywhere will make you wonder how it managed to take so long.”—Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland
“Incisive and packed with surprising revelations, Little Bosses Everywhere shows how lies and hucksterism built multilevel-marketing into an American institution. Bridget Read has written the definitive story of a scam that’s seduced millions.”—Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up
“Little Bosses Everywhere not only reveals the predatory nature of multilevel marketing for those swept up into its deceptive schemes, but by tracing the industry’s political influence over the last several decades, it also raises the specter that the nation itself is now being made over into a giant pyramid scheme.”—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
“A penetrating exposé of multilevel marketing schemes . . . . The perceptive analysis illuminates how MLM constitutes an unholy alliance of grift and the American bootstrapping ethos. . . . Readers will be rapt.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Thoroughly reported. . . . An impressive investigative work . . . . Bolstered by revealing interviews with people burned by MLMs and a touch of the madcap.”—Kirkus Reviews
Bridget Read is a features writer at New York magazine, reporting on housing inequality and the real estate industry for Curbed. Previously, she wrote for The Cut and was a culture writer at Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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