Losing Money on MK Inventory
Mary Kay products are so easy to sell! They just fly right off the shelf! It’s not even really like selling… you just share the products and people buy them. Except they really don’t. It’s almost impossible to create a viable retail business in Mary Kay or any MLM. (By viable retail business, I mean can you support yourself on retail sales alone.)
The prospects for selling the inventory you have on hand are so dismal, that women are willing to lose money to sell products to liquidators. Sure, Mary Kay has a program whereby you can return anything you bought in the last year for 90% of the wholesale price you paid. But anything older than that and you’re stuck with it. What are women to do? They build up thousands of dollars of inventory, adding a couple of hundred dollars here and a couple of hundred there. I shudder to think of the millions of dollars of products that are sitting in basements and garages and will never be sold.
One woman is trying to sell her inventory on Facebook Marketplace, hoping to get $1,250 for a lot of products worth over $2,000 wholesale. That’s a 37.5% discount off wholesale pricing. And she says that the price is the amount she still owes on her credit card for that inventory. She further said has “already lost out on thousands of dollars.” We can only guess how much inventory she had that she sold at a deep discount on wholesale prices.
Remind me again what a great business Mary Kay is? How you buy something for $1 and sell it for $2, and therefore have all the profits? Unless you can’t sell it (which is most people who get involved in MLM) and end up losing thousands of dollars.
Visit the
What they don’t tell you is the MK “wholesale” price is much higher than market “retail” for products of similar quality. From MKC’s perspective, the consultants are paying retail prices. MKC’s “cost” is a tiny fraction of what they charge the sales force for the products.
To make this a viable business for the sales force, MKC would have to drop the “wholesale” price significantly to allow the sales force to mark it up and still sell at a competitive “retail” price. As with all MLM products, the high distribution cost of the grossly inefficient MLM model pushes the price way too high for the product value, thanks to comissions and bonuses paid to so many layers of uninvolved upline parties. These products are simply too expensive for the value, making it nearly impossible to sell outside the downline.
By paying commissions and bonuses only to the person making the sale, MKC could drop by the “wholesale” price by well over 50%, making it at least possible for the sales reps to price the products competitively, giving them a chance to sell these products with a decent margin. As it is, even when selling at a loss, the products are still too expensive to create any real market demand.
But MLMs like MK don’t care what happens to the product once it has been purchased by the sales force. The downline is the true customer in their view…no outside sales necessary!
So many old products 20 years old at least. She can never return them. Pink and silver compacts late 90s to mid 2000s. So much debt. But the products fly off the shelf. Only during earthquakes and hurricanes or when the cat knocks them off. And to the far right expired Terme D’Isola. When it expires it apparently smells like degreaser mechanics use. Who is going to buy such a huge glut of MK? Not anyone in MK. Not allowed and it won’t give you commission.
And those eyeshadows and MK@Play were phased out in 2015.
Yeah…. there are a lot of products there that came out in the late 1990s. No one is going to buy products that are 30+ years old.
Her best bet is to throw it out and recycle as much of the plastic as possible.
Even if these were current items, no active consultant would buy them (unless recently discontinued) because they won’t get their “credit” for Star or DIQ or what have you.