Sunday, March 31, 2002
Make money the Herbalife way
… Then I called the next three numbers.
They all had the SAME message. It was a woman's voice, and she started the message with a distinctive “Ya know”. In the upcoming days of phone number investigation, I heard this message dozens of times. The next one was a wrong number, the sixth number was the “ya know” message. The seventh number had a different message, but it had some aspects of the first message, “20-year industry leader” and “tap into mail-order”. This message, too, was an effort to send me a 14-page booklet.
Well. I was stunned. These signs were all over town, in scores of different designs, and they were all the work of one company. A super-secret Fortune 500 company that never put it's name of it's ugly ever-present signs.
Via CamWorld, Work from Home, unwelcome Herbalife Signs
Cam's “amateur Internet sleuthing” comment notwithstanding, this is an excellent piece of journalistic reporting. I've seen the signs here in Lower Sheol as well and have been mildly curious to look into these “work from home” businesses. But the cynincal side of me (or rather, my cynical side channeling my Dad's cynical side) goes: “If you can make tons of money working from home, why promote competition?”
A similar question pops up whenever I see an infomercial hawking money making schemes (“Buy New York City with other people's money!”)—“If you can make money doing that, why tell other people?” It seems to me that there are three reasons why anyone would do this:
- The person found a good way of making money and wishes to help other people realize their goals in life by making tons of money (and if so, then why are they selling it as opposed to just giving the information away? (assuming they made enough money to satisfy themselves)).
- There's more money to be made in telling people how to make money using [insert system being sold here] than in actually using [insert system being sold here].
- There's no money to be made in telling or using [insert system being sold here] but the person selling it trying to get as much return as possible in getting out of the system.
If you want, here's a way to make tons of money that I'll give away
FREE!
There are a few simple steps.
- Get a nice computer system set up for graphics work.
- Get a nice scanner.
- Get a nice color printer.
- Scan in paper money of the type you would like to make.
- Print said scans on similar type of paper the money normally comes on.
- Live it up like there's no tomorrow until the proper authorities come and arrest your conterfeiting heinie.
Okay, I never said it was a good or legal way to make money (this is satire and is information that should not be used—repeat—this is satire and you should not follow this advice).
