I was manipulated by a pyramid scheme.

This was a few years ago, I had just graduated from university and I was working in a supermarket for minimum wage. I was starting to struggle financially as I was beginning to look into moving out of my mother’s house, so there was a lot of pressure on me to get a ‘decent’ job. This role was advertised as a graduate sales job and at the interview I was told that after 10 months of working for the company I could expect at least £10,000 a year. This was presented to me as a guarantee and I never had any reason to doubt this statement.

The thing to keep in mind as I continue is that I was very naive and pretty desperate. I had only had two jobs before this, and both were in retail for minimum wage. I did not have a lot of business experience and so I was an easy target for manipulation. For context, I stayed at this role for almost two months before realising what it really was, and I had multiple members of my family and friends encouraging me to quit as I couldn’t see how terrible this company actually was.

So, the role itself was to go door to door selling gas and electric, and yes that was as horrible as it sounds. The actual nature of the role was never explained to me, I was never told it would be door to door; this was initially explained on my first day. The working days were also never explained to me. Well, I was told it was Monday – Saturday but what they failed to mention was that we were required to work 10am until just after 10pm each day! And again, I didn’t know this until my first day. And I know these should have been all the red flags I needed but somehow I was so blind to it. So on my first day I had already been misled twice. But my supervisor (the second from the top of the pyramid scheme) just had such a way with words and basically told me exactly what I wanted to hear. And this was some really solid manipulation to not only make me stay, but to actually convince me that I could be a great success here.

Now, the third major red flag came on payday when I learned that there was actually no basic salary! We were paid on commission from sales even though we had to pay out of our pocket to travel to the office each day, then from the office to the houses we were knocking and back to the office. When I confronted my supervisor about this, he used his same manipulation tactics on me. He claimed that it had to be this way and after a few months I could hire people and I’d be making over £10k. This was when I learned that the £10k salary was most likely a lie. But my naivety just couldn’t let me quit so early, despite what people were telling me. I also developed a pretty serious inferiority complex and I was so scared of not making the money I was so convince I was going to make. I just had so much hope that this job was going to be the big break I needed.

This is the reason it was clearly a pyramid scheme. My supervisor was below the owner of the company; he had about eight ‘team leaders’ below him who each had about five sales assistants below them. They made money when their underlings made money. Basically when we made a sale our commission was shared up the pyramid, meaning the higher up you were the more money would make but the less work you would have to do. My supervisor was making over £200k a year from sitting in an office manipulating vulnerable people into selling on his behalf. And his superior, the owner, was making even more than that and didn't even have to sit in an office. He mostly stayed at home until he felt the need to come to the office to give us a terrible pep talk

Around two weeks into this role, my experience of this ‘job’ was as follows:

- We work 10am – nearly 11pm Monday – Saturday .

- We make a tiny commission on sales and no basic salary .

- We would get abused daily by people for knocking on their doors .

- There was no guarantee of any kind of salary or benefits.

- We had to pay our own expenses.

And then the final straw. At this company, a small group of us sales assistants would go on a ‘road trip’ each week in which we would be sent to the opposite end of the country for a week to knock doors there. The most outrageous thing about this was that we also had to pay for this out of our own pocket! We had to pay to travel there, for an Airbnb for all of us, food for the week etc. I ended up quitting a week after my first road trip.

After two months of working for this company I was exhausted from working so many hours, fragile and with worsening depression from so much abuse and much worse off financially due to the sheer amount of expenses we were required to pay for and the little commission we were given. I still struggle to understand how they could get away with this legally but I suppose the key is to manipulate the most vulnerable and fragile people, such as myself, who are unlikely to even understand that this is not okay, let alone report it. I am still ashamed of how easy I was to manipulate but they really are master manipulators.

The only positive thing I have taken from my experience with a pyramid scheme is that I am much harder to manipulate now, and I have become more aware of my rights as an employee. I have promised myself that I will never be walked all over again. I have barely recovered from that ‘job’ financially even three years later.

And, just in case there was any doubt about how terrible these people are, I’d like to end on an actual quote I will never forget told to me by the owner of the company to encourage better sales and success in me.

- “The key is to make so much money that you can drive the fastest sports car so you can drive so fast you don’t even have to be burdened with looking and the homeless people on the street who can’t afford your lifestyle.”