Horray! SIL has finally "seen the light" and stated that she makes very little money from the MLM she was a rep for, especially on an hourly basis. She will keep it up with the internet orders (no inventory), but will not market it any more.
Excited for you, although apparently the MLM bug has spread to my SIL. She isn't a sales consultant (yet) but she's hooked on MLM referral programs that allow her to earn free merchandise for persuading people to make purchases at parties she hosts. Fortunately, I live out of state so I'm out of the direct line of fire, but I still get included on all the Facebook invites (so that I feel included! Haha!) and watching the drama unfold is like watching a train wreck. I can't look away!
She's held a weekly MLM "purchase party" almost every weekend for the last few months and she became very miffed that the majority of her invitees showed little or no interest in attending.
So, she moved onto the "sneak attack" MLM party where she invites people over and they find out when they arrive that the main entertainment is the MLM consultant ("Girls night" turned out to be an Avon cosmetics sales party; "Margarita night" turned out to be a Party Time Mixes cocktail mix sales party; etc, etc). This has apparently worked a surprising number of times, until somebody finally had the balls to just walk out at the beginning of the sales pitch which led to a mass exodus and zero sales.
So, the most recent variation was the "sneak & block" debacle: she had the consultant arrive last and "block in" the other cars to make it extremely awkward for people to leave before the MLM person had reached the end of the presentation. Yeah, someone drove over their front lawn to leave.
As far as I can tell, a third of her friend group is no longer friendly with her over the whole sneak party issue, another third is planning an intervention (we can still be friends but none of us are ever coming to your house again, for any reason), and the final third apparently doesn't have an issue.
I'm sad that she's so trapped in the consumerist mindset that what she already owns is never enough, that she's willing to sacrifice her relationships with other people over the opportunity to get more stuff that doesn't do anything to make her happier. I hope the friend intervention (or the loss of friends) serves as a wake-up call for her.