Written by Frosty Rose

There comes a moment in the evolution of every Pink Truther when the mask that Mary Kay has so skillfully worn for decades slips. She learns a sliver of truth, “stumbles upon” Pink Truth, and the whole façade of financial freedom crumbles. My moment of truth came some time after I had quit chasing the dream. I had tucked my tail, folded up shop, and was convinced it was all my fault. I experienced the pain of losing girlfriends alone because I was lazy, a loser, a quitter. After all, the only way to fail in Mary Kay is to quit.

For years, I parroted the company line on the 90% buyback guarantee. “Mary Kay wants you to be a happy consultant. And if you’re not happy, they’ll buy back any inventory you can’t sell at 90% of what you paid for it. You can never be a consultant after that, but they want to ensure that you can go back to being a happy customer if the business doesn’t work out for you.”

I truly believed that corporate was sincere in their desire to mitigate financial losses for consultants who couldn’t succeed, and I always told my consultants all the details of the buy-back program. So, what changed? I learned that the buy-back program isn’t something Mary Kay does out of the goodness of their hearts, it’s Texas law, designed to protect consumers from pyramid schemes. (Here’s the link to the law, if you’re interested.)

But why does it matter? One of the most insidious concepts in Mary Kay, and one that begins very early in the recruiting process, is that new consultants should only listen to their up-line and never seek information anywhere else. After all, recruiters only want what’s best for their new team members (ha!), have nothing to gain from lying to them (double ha!), and always operate on the Golden Rule (ROFL). So consultants are relying exclusively on their directors and nationals to feed them information about everything, including the buy-back program. If they step out of line and look for information elsewhere, they will be shamed by the entire unit for “negative thinking,” “doubting the system,” and “analysis paralysis.” They hope that this exclusive reliance on the upline’s information lasts at least a year, when, poof, your buy-back guarantee on that massive inventory disappears. Didn’t know about it? Well, like everything, that’s all your fault. You should have done your research (but don’t do any research! Trust your sales director and get out there working on income-producing activities! This business works if you do!)

Let that sink in: Sales Director Betty Cooper is admitting that she lies to consultants about Mary Kay’s inventory buyback program.

Directors and nationals have every reason to lie to consultants about the buy-back guarantee. When a consultant returns inventory, they must pay back any commissions they earned on those orders. If a new consultant places a full-store inventory order of $3,600, a director stands to earn up to a little over $1,000 in commissions on that first order alone (if it’s a personal recruit, and if the director qualifies for several other bonuses). And we’ve seen, time and time again, how little money there actually is in MK directorship. The director is caught between her integrity and paying her mortgage. If she’s that deep in the fog, the choice is obvious.

Directors like Betty will tell themselves and everyone else that they are honest about the buy-back program. She tells her new consultants about it, after all! But, by her own admission, it’s very brief, and hidden in the massive amounts of information a consultant is expected to retain during “initial training.” It’s partial information at best, and it’s sandwiched in an inventory talk that is heavy on emotion and light on logic. So most consultants filter out that information or don’t register it at all.

And Betty has very few returns, but oodles of disgruntled former consultants with shelves full of product they can’t move that’s past the one-year mark to return to the company. She can justify to herself, just as I did when I was recruiting, that she has her recruits’ best interests at heart, and that her low return rate is evidence that things are working as they should—she’s training and supporting consultants correctly, encouraging them to get to the weekly meeting, teaching them how to do a Power Start of 30 faces in 30 days.

But, then why isn’t Betty driving that trophy on wheels, the Pink Cadillac? Why, after all these years as a director, has she not made the leap to national? The cult of personal responsibility runs deep in Mary Kay, and directors fall prey to it, too. Dear Betty will tell herself that the answer lies in her personal activity. Perhaps she should do a Power Start of her own every month this quarter. Maybe go back to the things she was doing five or ten, or even twenty years ago, when she was more successful, recruiting more, selling more.

She’ll continue burying her head, as I did, looking for answers in her own activity, her own attitude. But we at Pink Truth know where the answers are, and it’s not usually in what the individual is doing or not doing. It’s that the system is designed to fail for the majority of consultants and directors. Corporate can’t pay cash for a fancy new building or manufacturing plant, and nationals can’t make six figures in retirement, if the vast majority of consultants aren’t funding them via excessive product ordering. And, as I learned, a widespread cover-up of the nature of the buy-back program.

So, where does that leave us? If you just “stumbled upon” Pink Truth recently, and you’re still in your one-year window of that initial order, don’t wait! Send it back! If you’re outside that window, you can still return anything you’ve bought in the last twelve months. If you’re questioning something else your upline has told you, go do your research. Talk to independent sources. Your upline has a huge financial incentive to mislead you—ask someone who doesn’t have anything to gain from your success or failure. And most of all, stop beating yourself up. The house always wins this game, until you decide to leave the building. The real truth is the opposite of MK wisdom: The only way to succeed at Mary Kay is to quit.