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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Home labor
Stay-at-home moms chase pocket money and "a life" through a revived home-party selling industry. The overhead is low -- and so are their earnings.
By Nora Macaluso
[03/02/00]

Fear with a shot of vanity
Marketers capitalize on the insecurity and ignorance of new parents.
By Pia Hinckle
[03/01/00]

We obsess, therefore we buy
Parenting manuals multiply along with parental insecurities.
By Karen Karbo
[03/01/00]

Stealth merchandising
Why is the venerable Scholastic book club company peddling cheesy toys in classrooms?
By Shoshana Marchand
[02/29/00]

Hooked on tutoring
After-school programs bleed Mom and Dad while dissing Junior's teachers.
By Catherine Davis
[02/29/00]

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She had been a schoolteacher, but taking care of 25 children in addition to her own kids was not what she had in mind. The women's movement was in full swing at that point and it had gotten to her.

Her good friend Jerri, who put her daughters on the school bus with "ERA YES!" buttons on their jackets, was one of many people who encouraged Mom to want more. Another friend bought an ice business and enlisted my mother to help haul and deliver ice to local restaurants and grocery stores.

Also Today Home labor Stay-at-home moms chase pocket money and "a life" through a revived home-party selling industry. The overhead is low -- and so are their earnings. By Nora Macaluso   The family for sale We take a week to examine the ravenous commercial forces that prey on us each day.

When she learned that she did not find manual labor charming, my mom took a job as a receptionist for a psychologist friend of my father's. Menial, she found, was only a small improvement over manual.

As her attempts at employment were failing, my mom was developing an interest in vitamins and natural foods that blossomed into a fairly major lifestyle change for our family. Our kitchen had never been stocked with sweets, but by 1977, it was free of refined sugar and the other villains of the day, those ubiquitous, insidious, vaguely named "preservatives." These evils were replaced with the usual health-food store suspects: carob, honey, whole-grain bread, wheat germ and gargantuan vitamin supplements.

While I was proud to be the only 8-year-old I knew who could swallow a fistful of vitamins with one swig of juice, I did resent the absence of normal food in our kitchen. At school I could never get anyone to trade their potato chips or Ding-Dongs for my bag of dried fruit, and I found my only solace in slipping over to my grandmother's house for contraband cookies and candy.

Despite my protests and rebellions, my mom stood firm in her convictions, and when she met another mother at my grade school who happened to sell Shaklee vitamins, which, based on my mom's research, were the top of the line, she became interested not only in buying them, but in selling them, too. This other mother, Kaye, sent my mom home with motivational tapes about how wonderful Shaklee products were and about how very wealthy one could become selling them.

The people speaking on the tapes claimed to have become wealthy selling Shaklee, and when my parents listened to them describe how simple it was to make loads of money selling and recruiting, they could not say no. Not only would they enjoy financial security, my parents imagined, but they would do so as they sold products that made people's lives better. Their only reservation was that this seemed a lot like pyramid schemes they had heard of, but Kaye quickly assured them that Shaklee was different, and while my mom accepted this assurance, she cannot recall the rationale behind it.

Shaklee became for my parents, as network marketing ventures do for so many, a spiritual, religious experience. They went out to spread the gospel of their new home business, and for a time, they had a large group of friends who had signed on to sell Shaklee for them.

My mom says they were always up front with people about the fact that they would be recruiting, that they never lured them to meetings with the vague pitches I hear these days such as "Could I come to your house and show you how to cook healthier food?" I do remember an exchange my parents had with a couple from church who politely but firmly declined an invitation to a meeting. The words "pyramid scheme" were mentioned and my parents drove home shaking their heads about how that couple just didn't get it, about how it was their loss. They had rejected the gospel and would now, sadly, have to live with the consequences.

Most of their other friends and acquaintances, though, were receptive. I remember many evenings lying on the living room floor with my brother, Tony, listening to tapes and KTEL records that he had insisted my parents order after he saw commercials for them on TV. We had to amuse ourselves with Herb Alpert, Crystal Gayle, love songs of the '70s and the soundtrack to "The Jazz Singer" because the TV was in the family room, which was crowded with people who had come to hear the pitch.

After a few months, though, the crowds got too big for the family room, and my parents began having meetings at our church and in a conference room at the Holiday Inn. I attended some of these meetings, and felt a surge of pride as I listened to my father speak confidently about the advantages of selling Shaklee and saw people fall under his spell.

For her part, my mother wrote and sent out a monthly newsletter for all the people, about 100 of them, who either worked for her and my dad or bought products from them. As my parents moved up the chain of command from lowly "distributors" to power-wielding "supervisors," I believed that the wealth they talked about was just around the corner.

They did indeed turn a corner, but it was not the one they hoped for or expected. Living in a fairly rural part of Illinois, they realized that all their friends and friends of friends had already heard the pitch, and that almost everyone in the 50-mile radius who was going to sell Shaklee already was. This discovery not only turned my parents' religious fervor into dejection, but dampened the spirits of their distributors as well.

Next page | I had believed with my whole heart that Shaklee would change our lives