The Truth About the Mary Kay Car
I love talking about what a racket the “free car” is for Mary Kay consultants and directors. It’s set up to look like it’s free, but it’s not. It may be the most genius manipulation tool Mary Kay Ash ever came up with. The car itself is free advertising for the company every time it’s on the road. And it literally costs the company nothing. They put minimum ordering requirements in place to pay for the car, and if the minimums aren’t met, the car driver has to pony up the cash to cover the lease payment.
Women in the Mary Kay Cult are all hyped up about things like the not-so-free car, until they’re not. Take Heather Wickstrom, who was booted out of Mary Kay in 2023. While she was in MK, she was all-in on the company and had lots of not-so-nice things to say about Pink Truth. But then the company terminated her for violating the sales director’s agreement, and suddenly this pink Cadillac driver started spilling the beans about how terrible MK is.
(No, Heather didn’t “choose” to leave MK. She was fired.)
Here’s Heather when she was committed to being a lifer in MK. People told her pink cars were stupid. (She disagreed, obviously.)
But after she got out of the cult, Heather decided the pink cars ARE STUPID. You don’t get an opinion about Mary Kay unless you drove a Cadillac for more than 2 years.
But if you ever did drive a Cadillac, you’re a great candidate for Heather’s current MLM. After all, her team has the highest number for former MK people on it, especially former Cadillac drivers.
And more importantly… Heather drove NINE pink cars. And she likes dropping tea on Mary Kay from time to time. A few months after she was kicked out of MK, she told everyone that the car is not free! (She also said almost no one is making money in MK. Duh. We’ve been saying that at Pink Truth for two decades!)
But check out what Heather had to say about the cars in Mary Kay. The car is not really free. The maintenance requirements are a problem. Prepare to pay up if you don’t make production numbers. “I overworked myself to keep an image I couldn’t sustain.”
Now make no mistake… Heather doesn’t have it any better in her current MLM. She’ll tell you it’s the greatest, but we’ve heard that before out of her lying mouth.
Just remember: These sales directors and recruiters know the truth about the MLMs they shill for. They just won’t tell it to YOU, the potential victim, until after they leave the MLM. Then suddenly they’re the truth-teller who is willing to spill the tea.
Visit the
Before I landed here, I knew very little about MLM in general and MK in particular. I was against it because of animal testing in a self-righteous kind of way, and in fact I knew it best from the “Bloom County” book Night of the Mary Kay Commandos (“Even their Uzis are pink”!). By 202whatever I was one of those people who were surprised to know it was still around. And if it was, it was grandma makeup like Tangee or Max Factor that everyone had forgotten about except for a handful of diehards.
I had no idea how predatory, and futile, the whole thing was. The car was probably the most perplexing part of the whole thing. I’d have assumed they were prizes given by the company to saleswomen who had achieved either a certain number of years or who had hit certain sales milestones, and that the cars were theirs to keep (after paying taxes on it, same as any other prize or bonus income). Because that’s how prizes work in the real world: either you win it or you don’t. Either something is yours or it isn’t.
“The car is owned by the company and you have to recruit lots and lots of people and spend lots and lots of money to be allowed to drive it, and if you don’t keep recruiting even more people and spend lots more money, you have to pay the company, who owns the car, even more money so they’ll let you keep driving it, and if you don’t recruit lots and lots more people and spend LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of money they’ll send a tow truck and yoink it right out of your driveway in front of everyone, and also you have to spend EVEN MORE MONEY on their overpriced insurance before they’ll let you drive this car that they own” was kind of a Klein bottle-shaped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle) peg to fit into my square head.
Given the rate at which new consultants wash out and the unlikelihood of any decent profit from product sales, I finally understood: the company only cares about the company, and for them, this arrangement is cherry. Inventory sales to frontloaded recruits, inventory sales to directors desperate to keep their trophy on wheels, inventory sales to their downlines hounded by their desperate directors, copays when the directors inevitably fail… the initial cost of the car must be peanuts to what they’re making off the backs of their loyal minions.
Just diabolical.
With the switch to EVs, hopefully more directors will A) realize what they’re doing to themselves and their downlines and stop the madness, which won’t happen, so B) given the lack of infrastructure to support EVs they’ll take the cash compensation instead and further nibble away at the company’s profits.
I don’t think pink cars are stupid, but if you’re gonna drive a pink car, own it. Go metallic fuchsia or bright bubblegum or iridescent pearl. Pale powder puff pink is kind of wimpy.
Yup. If you really want a MK car without the headaches, buy your own pink car and get a custom badge that says “Mary Kay” with the Shango font.
I am still paying off debt from the ridiculous Chevy I drove for 4 years. I could have bought my own car for the debt I went into. I feel so stupid for falling for it.
Please don’t feel stupid. This is a very sophisticated con that has been perfected over 65 years.
Thank you! That truly means a lot.
I was in over $24,000 of credit card debt by the time I quit and I didn’t even have a car. A national at my DIT week said she was $75,000 in debt when she earned her Cadillac. An offhand comment like that was a completely normal thing to do for your job.
The manipulation game is strong and, as Tracy says, they’ve been honing it for 65 years. Congratulations on getting out!
So I wonder what she did that made them terminate her? I also find it fascinating that women who find out the truth in Mary Kay will quit and jump right into another MLM! Do they honestly think it will be any different? The structure of multi-level marketing is the same in any MLM company. It’s all about recruiting onto the pyramid and the one at the top makes the money. Same dance, different song.
“Free car” is a joke. The lease is in your name so you hold all of the liability while the company reaps the benefits. If you don’t grind out enough production to keep it and can’t pay the lease payment yourself, the repo man cometh. Even if you survive the term of the lease, you don’t have the option to buy it out and get the title, you have to start over with a new lease on a different car.
Leasing itself is not great: after spending thousands you have no equity in the car, you get stuck on a hamster wheel of nonstop monthly payments, there are mileage limits or you have to pay a penalty, there are wear and tear penalties, and you have to pay the higher insurance rates, more so if it’s an MK car because you have to use their insurance company with no option to find competitive rates elsewhere.
Real prizes are won, they’re not leased. The MK car is no prize.
I’m curious about what this does to your credit if you don’t make production? I mean the lease payment is made for you if you make production right? But if you have to pay a portion, then does it ding your credit anyway?
It’s leased in your name so you take any credit hits if you go over the mileage limit, a payment is late, or it gets repo’d.
I feel her on the car thing. I wasn’t prepared for that “free” expense. Took my taxes to where i owed way more than i could afford and then missed productions on car and lost it. I was only at the 1st car level. The numbers that your team does consistently or even to earn the use more than pays for the car. This company would be smarter to just purchase the car than lease them.
Both Sam Dee and Erin Bies recently covered a training video from Cleta which was designed to push the $3,600 Starter Kit onto new consultomers. We all know why.
So crazy how well the MLM game works. It’s basically a cash-back buying club, where you get a portion of yours (and your downline’s) purchases back. Therefore, you and your downline can never get back as much as you put in collectively. This is because so little is ever sold outside the downline.
In the real world, the company’s revenue comes from purchases made by outside customers. This means what they can give you is divorced from how much product you purchase personally. In fact, in nearly all cases you don’t have to purchase anything at all from the company to make money for your efforts.
This is the reality of MLM. No downline can be profitable as a whole, as the personal and downline purchases are the primary revenue source. Outside sales are neither significant nor even required. And yet look at how many folks are tangled up in this at any given time…getting only a tiny fraction back for the money they spend. Losing money while the company and the kingpins at the top of the pyramid profit directly from the aggregate losses in the downline.
This does not represent the way most women run their businesses and the way Mary Kay Inc wants us to run our businesses. Consultants who buy product they don’t need aren’t smart business owners. Some consultants choose to “buy the prize” so they end up with inventory they don’t sell quickly or at all. Some directors “buy” the cadillac, meaning they submit a huge order to make up the difference needed. The company does not allow this the first time a director earns a car. They want her to know that she can book, coach, sell, and recruit, and she can teach others to do the same. After the first car, the company does allow directors to submit orders to make up the difference, but up to a point still.
This 100% represents the way women run things in Mary Kay. Lies are what it’s all about, and this comment is just part of that.
YES, corporate does allow a first time car driver to buy their way into the car. How? All they have to do is put the production in the names of their new recruits. Have the recruit pay for the inventory and reimburse her. It happens every single day with every single car driver.
Mary Kay doesn’t give a hoot how much a director can book, coach, sell, and recruit. All they care about are the orders coming in.
R
If that was the case why does Cleta “train” her team to push $3600 Starter Kit to their new recruits?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjzSLy3rQ5k
Richard Rogers has died.
I *JUST* saw that headline! WOW!
Read all about it!
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/2026/03/31/richard-rogers-son-mary-kay-ash-former-company/