You Don’t Know How Holiday Sales Work
Y’all are seriously clueless about how this buisness actually works. I made over $700 just THIS month from holiday gift baskets and stocking stuffers. That’s real money and it paid for most of my Christmas shopping, but I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.
Instead you’re here whining and talking trash like always. Maybe if you actually TRIED instead of being negative all the time, you’d see results too. This is the EASIEST time of year to make sales. People are literally out here begging for cute affordable gifts. Mary Kay sells itself if you just put in a little effort.
But I guess sitting around on the internet complaining is easier, huh? 🙄
I did vendor shows, I posted my holiday specials on FB, I followed up with customers. And guess what? It WORKED. You can’t say the buisness doesn’t work when you clearly never did. Maybe you just wanted a paycheck for doing nothing, I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m proud of what I did this month. And no amount of your “truth telling” is gonna change that.
Visit the
$700? Ok- now figure ALL of your expenses (mileage, wrapping paper etc., discounts, booth decor, freebies) and most importantly, how many hours you worked this month. Your vendor fairs alone must have taken a good chunk of time. Now figure how much per hour of time invested you actually made- something tells me it is less than minimum wage.
$700 sale–and what was the profit? I guarantee she had ” spend $50- thet $20 off ” Or” buy one, get one.”
Plus old makeup that she bought , hoping to make 50% profit. She had to mark that down to sell it what– 25% profit?
Mary Kay Math . Kaybots needs to go back to 9th grade math.
And the vendor fees can be pretty steep for a high quality event! I’ve seen very few vendor shows (good ones at that) in my area that are free or under $50-$100 to participate.
And MK Corp does not allow consultants to SELL at these vendor events, just collect leads.
“You own your own business!” LOL
Sorry, my world’s tiniest violin is in the shop.
I worked at a department store from October 1998 through October 2008, starting off as seasonal help. I know exactly what holiday sales are about: horrible shifts that sometimes mean you don’t even get to see daylight for days on end, no time for your own errands, increasingly desperate, clueless, and crappy people as the 25th comes closer, wondering if you can sneak out on your break and unalive Mariah Carey after you’ve heard “All I Want for Chrismas Is YOOoOOOOOOoOOOUUuuuuUUuUUuuUUU” for the 10th time that day.
The thing is, there’s camaraderie. All the employees are stuck in the same stinking garbage scow and we supported each other, whether it was covering the register so you could sneak in a bit of shopping or a potty break, or recipes for cookies you could bake way ahead ot time. On Chrismas Eve the department managers would throw parties in the stockrooms and we’d exchange little gifts. We weren’t competing with each other for customers – the better the department’s sales were, the more Corporate would get off our backs with their quotas and nagging.
Another thing is, the store had buying staff that selected merchandise that people want around the holidays. People want sweaters for matchy-matchy envy bait photos, wrapping paper, Christmas trees and other decorations, cute Christmas baby clothes the child will probably never even wear, that season’s artificial demand toy (The Furbies… my god the Furbies…) big screen TVs, party dresses, candles, tableware, handbags, funny socks, pajamas, chocolates, perfume… We had those. People wanted them. They came in without us having to yoink people off the street. Also, the buyers got bulk pricing deals from the manufacturers so even selling things at deep discounts, they still made a profit.
$700 in a month? Amateur hour. Sometimes you would get more than that in one sale, and not even in expensive departments like electronics or jewelry. Plus, as Pinkboo points out above, all your incidental costs plus your time and labor come out of those 7 bills, leaving you with….?
The thing that mattered most, the only reason any of us put ourselves through that, was the paycheck. They stunk, too, but we got paid an hourly rate that was disclosed when we were hired. Commission departments got what they were told they’d get. We were able to pay bills and buy food and presents because we knew that paycheck was coming. The long hours at least had a tradeoff in better pay. And, since today is December 26, Return Day, when a customer returned stuff WE DIDN’T HAVE TO EAT THE COST AND WE GOT TO KEEP WHATEVER COMMISSIONS WE’D EARNED.
You’re damn right that sitting around on the internet is easier than all that. I’ll never do it again.
You’re damn stupid if you think only Kbots are the only ones who know what hard work and hustle around Chrismas is all about.
Sorry, OP. No one is making any real money selling commodity retail products out of their homes. The only MK folks making anything decent do so through relentless recruiting and downline front-loading.
$700 for your biggest month of the year does not even cover the cost of your qualifying minimums for the year. Its not profit until all of your costs are covered. Only a small fraction of MLM participants manage to cover their costs. An even tinier fraction make any real money.
Set up and maintain a proper business ledger and you will see all of this for yourself!
Y’all are seriously clueless about how this buisness (sic) actually works.
Sorry ma’am but you re talking to career car owners, sash-wearing stage-walkers here. They know just how the “buisness works”!
I made over $700 just THIS month from holiday gift baskets and stocking stuffers.
Is that the most you have made for a month this year? If so, then your annual earnings are less then $8,000. My daughter worked brick and mortar retail for several years. Her highest daily commission was over $800 but she still got her hourly wage on top of that!
In 2022, a bad storm was going to hit us Christmas Eve so the local factories decided to move up close down/clean/maintenance to 22nd and 23rd instead and giving everyone Christmas Eve as paid leave. One of my local Huns had made her whole December sales strategy around selling to men at the factory gatehouse and her whole plan was derailed by the weather.
That’s real money and it paid for most of my Christmas shopping, but I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.
It’s only profit for you once you’ve taken out your overhead costs and then you can work out how much you earned per hour. That’s a better way of deciding how much my time is worth, not if it paid for a single day of the year.
Instead you’re here whining and talking trash like always.
Is this trash? It’s the 2024 Mary Kay Income Disclosure for Canada.
https://imgur.com/a/mary-kay-canadian-income-disclosure-2024-hPNN90o
Maybe if you actually TRIED instead of being negative all the time, you’d see results too. This is the EASIEST time of year to make sales.
It’s easy ONLY if some-one actually wants the gift. Otherwise, it’s clutter awaiting Goodwill or landfill.
People are literally out here begging for cute affordable gifts. Mary Kay sells itself if you just put in a little effort.
Where in Mary Kay Wagner Rogers Eckman Weaver Louis Miller Hallenbeck Ash’s name are the cute gifts? I’ve seen how much effort goes into making those offerings and cute doesn’t describe the horrors some of you display. As for affordable, that’s a matter of personal choice.
But I guess sitting around on the internet complaining is easier, huh? 🙄
When I’m on the internet, I’m either gaming or doom scrolling Reddit just like Al Gore intended.
I did vendor shows, I posted my holiday specials on FB, I followed up with customers. And guess what? It WORKED.
That sounds like a lot of effort for such a small pay-out. My daughter earns more than it in a week, after taxes and other withholdings.
You can’t say the buisness (sic) doesn’t work when you clearly never did. Maybe you just wanted a paycheck for doing nothing, I don’t know.
Most people want a paycheck which reflects the effort they put in and the amount of time spent doing so. As such, most people earn much more at their jobs than (general) MKBots do.
Anyway, I’m proud of what I did this month. And no amount of your “truth telling” is gonna change that.
Just think how much you could have earned doing a real job for real money. Much more than a paltry $700 gross. And that is the TRUTH!
Don’t make me laugh. Oops too late. 😂 As a retail business owner I understand perfectly how Christmas sales work. I also understand that $700 is an extremely low return from all the extra time and effort put in. If that’s how we ran our business, we’d go OUT of business. Seriously, Mary Kay has you ladies so brainwashed to believe these low returns from so much time and effort is normal. Out here in the real world, if we invested that much time and extra cash and work into something and made basically zero profit at the end of it, we would stop doing that and move on to something else. We don’t have an emotional attachment to a certain way of doing things. We don’t believe that if we keep doing the same things over and over and over again we will one day magically get a different result. If it’s not working, if it’s not benefitting us more than the extra work it’s taking, WE STOP DOING IT.
So, dear visitor to this site, we are not the ones who don’t understand how Christmas sales (or just sales in general) work. You are.
All of this! And I wish they would watch the show Shark Tank to understand how real business leaders make decisions and assess if an opportunity makes sense. A vast majority of IBCs are lacking education on the basic principles of business, sales, and investing and it shows.
Some-one tried to pitch Lyonesse on Dragon’s Den.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Zumt5BBgE
Lord, bless your heart. How much time did you spend “earning” that $700? How much money did you spend on supplies and gas selling them? I got paid more at work and I have insurance and a 401k and was able to buy Christmas gifts with no problem. But go on with your bad self PTC!
They spend a lot of money on wrapping paper and other materials to “fancy it up.”
Imagine the excited recipient digging through two pounds of cellophane, tissue paper and ribbon just to find a small tube of…you guessed it…Mint Bliss Foot Lotion.
and socks!
Honestly, after the cold I’ve had for the past four days, a decent pair of warm socks would have been a boon.
Awww… bless your heart!
You “made” $700 this month. No, you didn’t. That was your gross income before any expenses. How much did you spend on wrapping, packaging, gas, shipping, etc?
I worked Christmas and the day after, and since the president declared the 24th and 26th as holidays (which means he gave every federal employee a 5-day weekend), I get holiday pay for 3 of my 5 shifts this week. (Hospitals don’t close because it’s the weekend or Christmas.) Did I do anything different? Go the extra mile? Stretch that goal a bit? Nope. I showed up to work and did my job. (Of course, we had a massive potluck and ate ourselves stupid.) That first paycheck in January is going to be niiiice.
An extra $700 is a few days working OT for me.
It paid for MOST of your Christmas gifts? That’s a spendy Christmas. I hope they were quality gifts that will last for years to come and not a mountain of TikTok holiday restocks or a Labubu or some other cheap crap that will end up in a landfill in a month. MK is about overbuying and hoarding after all.
Lololol someone’s bitter about your respectable income opportunities OR wounded by the very valid statement regarding MK TRUTH #3: Spend Foolishly and Hoard, Spend Recklessly and Hoard, repeat repeat repeat. #2 of course is RECRUIT & FRONTLOAD, RECRUIT & FRONTLOAD, ad infinitum. #1 Obey Blindly.
OP definitely has no clue about how profitable businesses are run. The first red flag for me when I read about mkrap’s operations was that SALES are not tracked. Not tracked at all. Nopers. No tracking of SALES TO CUSTOMERS.
I still cannot fathom this. A business that doesn’t record the sales to customers.
Stop the insanity lol. Where is the assessment of success when SALES TO CUSTOMERS ARE NOT TRACKED.
Clearly not in SELLING TO CUSTOMERS. I still cannot fathom this. What is the sense in a “business” that finds it too inconvenient and confusing(?) to track sales to customers. The sole reason for being is selling to customers and mkrap doesn’t find it necessary for consultants to keep a record of this.
Clearly it’s because there AREN’T sales of any substance to customers who aren’t kbots. For those who had lots of sales to outsiders, you must be in the minority. Very rebellious of you to keep track of your sales to outside customers in plain defiance of mkcorpse policy!
OP I pray you will recover well once mkorpse transitions the business out of MLMing which is plainly imminent. They are trying to post blazing red flags to consultants but you all choose to ignore them. You just keep mouthing the “trust mkorpse they always have OUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART!”. OMG stop the insanity. Who, as a true business professional, would ever believe a corporation engaged in MLM ABOVE ALL, could TRULY BELIEVE they have a real person’s best interests in mind! That is ………… CandyLand beliefs! Monopoly money is what they offer, that’s for sure! Spend $4000 REAL DOLLARS so we can reward you with a $40 amazon item. Spend hundreds of thousands of REAL DOLLARS to “win” a trip you could’ve bought 10 of WITH THAT MONEY YOU SPENT ON GARBAGE no one wants but you strongarm them into “buying”. I say that in quotes as you sell AT A LOSS TO YOURSELF.
Stop the insanity, cause if you don’t do it for yourself, mkorpse won’t until they pull the rug out from underneath all of you who are ONLY blind because you REFUSE to see the writing on the wall.
When you realize that the real customers are the IBCs it all makes sense. They track those sales very closely.
Any sale from an IBC to the general public is unimportant – Mary Kay got their profit when the IBC placed an order.
Merry Christmas, Lazy Gardens!!! It was thanks to you for sure when I first came upon Pink Truth that so many mindbending mysteries were explained to me about MLMs overall and mk specifically. I could NOT figure out how on earth any business could disavow tracking retail sales UNTIL it got through this thick head that the sales were to the consultants, there is NOT any need whatsoever for a consultant to sell to a single person. The point of the consultant is to buy buy buy from mk and the train stops there, destination arrived. mk made money, upline made money, done deal.
I’ve thanked you before, and so many others who have educated me on so many aspects of business, and BAD business, and I am so grateful to each and every one of you. xoxoxoxoxoxo
Not sure how I overlooked this absurdity…she made a WHOLE SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS THIS MONTH! AT CHRISTMAS. Wow. Wow. She’s crowing about that? With the amount needed to retain the “discount”, isn’t that like $600 minimum order? So regardless $700 in “sales” is nothing to crow about. It just isn’t. This is allegedly her own business and THAT’S her brag amount. This is just so sad.
In the 80s, I would get a loan for a $1,000 around October to buy gifts for my family and inlaw family, no kids myself. This was for the adults and 4 to 8 kids. So, I apologize, Ms. OP, $700 on Christmas, in 2025, no, I am not impressed. Cause I took a loan cause I was poor but Christmas was my time to run amok on my loved ones.
Ms. OP……I wish you a life of joy and wonder beyond your limited wildest dreams.
Really? $700? Wow…made WAY more than that over the past weekend and didn’t have to work at all since I have paid holidays and PTO. You know…from my REAL JOB that so many of the sales force apparently loathe.