Sad this morning...

One of the blogs I frequent, I Will Teach You to be Rich, had an article this morning about MLM and similar schemes. While the author, Ramit, was vilifying MLM schemes, he mentioned that he would never destroy a friendship by introducing a sales element into it. I thought of some people that I met through a friend of mine, and later re-met through church. We got along pretty well and stuff, and talked about our common interests.

Then later on, they tried to recruit us for an MLM scheme... I forget the name of it, but it was pretty much "networked marketing"... we buy a starter package of vitamins, buy some other materials, and then we too can become an independent distributor. Not too much pressure, they weren't overbearing, but they made enough follow-up calls that eventually we had to be firm with them and tell them we weren't interested, no really, we weren't interested. Our relationship wasn't really the same after that.

They didn't make any exorbitant promises to us, and one thing I remember was that they both had full-time jobs, as a realtor and a computer network technician... jobs you think would be sufficient to generate a decent income for a young family of five. Well, with three kids, there can never be enough income, but you get my drift. They obviously weren't in it to have a yacht on the side, or to be able to retire to their mansion in the hills... anyway, I'm rambling.

I'm just sad for that family because I know they're probably caught in something that doesn't add a lot of value to their lives, and I wonder how many potential friendships they've traded for income opportunities.