Prelude to a Post Part II — Responses and Comments and Emails, Oh My!
The cure for acne is in there somewhere . . .
I’d very much like to take some time and thank everyone who wrote in regarding my Mary Kay Lady post. The comments were uplifting and the feedback was amazing.
One thing I have to smack myself up about is the fact that I have a tendency to write as if you all CAN READ MY MIND. You can’t. And I know this. But sometimes I click the “publish” button a bit too early, especially when I’m angry.
I say this because I forgot to mention in my Mary Kay Lady post that I have spent some time reading through a few of the acne forums I’ve found on various medical websites. And to say the least, what I’ve read is troubling.
Grown men and women of various ages and professions discuss openly how they feel about themselves, their doctors, and the support (or lack thereof) they receive from their families and/or friends. Some of it is inspiring, but much of it is just plain dreadful and leaves me with a heavy heart. Can you imagine contemplating suicide because you’ve tried everything for your acne and nothing seems to work and your breakouts are so horribly painful that you CAN’T EVEN BRUSH YOUR TEETH? Me either. My situation is NOTHING compared to what some of these people are going through.
I should have added that to my Mary Kay Lady post. But I didn’t, and I apologize for that. Because there are a few folks who sent me emails who think that there are bigger and more serious issues to complain about or throw my support behind than acne.
And I get that. I get that acne isn’t terminal. Acne doesn’t cause earthquakes that kill people, nor does it cause non-operable brain tumors.
However, it DOES make people wish they were dead. And that’s wrong.
Approaching someone at the mall and telling them that you can help them with their acne is just plain tacky, especially if you are NOT A MEDICAL OR DERMALOGICAL PROFESSIONAL. It’s also inappropriate. And wrong. And I did something about it.
Someone very close to me stated that I should have just told the Mary Kay Lady that what she was doing was inappropriate and should have moved on. But I just couldn’t do that. Mostly because I tend to put my bitch on quickly instead of taking the high road. This time, though, I needed to stand up for myself because I was in the presence of my children. Here is how I responded to my friend:
As far as the Mary Kay lady goes, I still believe she needed to hear what I had to say. If I had said to her, “You know, what you’re doing is totally tacky and if you keep doing it you’re going to eventually approach a woman who isn’t afraid to give you a black eye,” she wouldn’t have gotten it, and then she would have just gone on to the next person and the next person until sooner or later someone punched her in the face. I punched her in the face without punching her in the face. MK consultants are a different breed. They are taught NOT to hear “no.” And they are taught to keep pushing and pushing and pushing until you eventually say yes. Do you know that one time at a collaborative show (with different consultants from different businesses all selling their stuff), I told an MK consultant that I didn’t like a product, and her first response was to ask me if I “had used it correctly”?! It was EYE SHADOW. How do you not use EYE SHADOW correctly? So I said, “I didn’t like how it creased after two hours,” and she said, “Did you try using our eyelid base prep?” And it could have gone on and on. They have a response or script for EVERYTHING. Going up to a total stranger at a mall and tactlessly approaching them about a sensitive issue is WRONG, and she needed to hear that. There are better opening lines than, “I’ve got something that can help with that problem you’ve got going on right there.” But it’s not for me to teach her leadership skills and tact. Most would consider using common sense, but MK consultants lack common sense, so that’s what her upline is for, and that was why I brought up her director. I guess being disenfranchised by direct sales has made me abrasive to the industry. MY common sense lesson revolves around how I appeared to my boys. I didn’t like that they saw me like that. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t regret saying what I said. The boys WILL have to stand up for themselves some day, and that’s what their Mom did. I didn’t totally lose control; I didn’t get in her face or scream at her – I just made sure she heard me. When I said, “Are you out of your friggin mind,” I wanted to be sure I got her attention. A few people looked our way, but for the most part people kept going along without so much as a 2nd glance. The only audience we had were two girls selling curling irons at the kiosk next to us and the boys. Jake referred to me “being mean” because he recognized my tone and the look on my face. I never said anything derogatory. I delivered a message. And I’m sure she’ll remember it for a very long time. You’re right – I am confrontational, probably because I can’t STAND walking away from whatever it is I’m walking away from and then five minutes later wish I’d said something. I HAD to say something because she lacked any knowledge of how people with acne feel. I stuck up for myself because there are people who would have let her go on with her schpeel while totally dying inside. People who have been to the doctor over and over and have tried EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN (perhaps INCLUDING Mary Kay) and nothing seems to work but still manage to leave the house every day because they have to. You should read some of the forums that I’ve visited about acne. I suppose I should have written about what I’ve read, and I did touch on how acne makes me feel personally, but did you know that there are GROWN MEN AND WOMEN contemplating suicide because of what their skin looks like? Reading about them makes me feel like my “problem” isn’t all that bad. But what if I WERE contemplating that, and this MK consultant had approached me? What then? Hopefully I prevented that from ever happening.
So that’s where I stand. I have no regrets about how I responded, and neither should anyone else who gets approached by one of these Pink Zealots. What pisses me off even more is the fact that I LOVE SOME OF MARY KAY’S PRODUCTS. I do. I use their wrinkle cream, and I just finished telling someone that their Medium Coverage Foundation has always done me proud. It’s never made me break out, the coverage is awesome, and it doesn’t leave my skin oily. Why can’t I just buy it at CVS? Until then, I’ll just buy it from someone trying to dump their inventory on eBay or Craigslist.
Okay . . . this was part II of my prelude. I will eventually get to my real post about my doctor and what she prescribed and how it’s working and what it’s doing to my body. But first, I need to write about something funny. I haven’t brought the funny in a while.
08
03 2010
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The work I do from 8 to 5 involves saving lives.
Hey Kathleen! I read your earlier post and wanted to reply badly, but man life is just so freaking busy. In any event, being an ex MKer, I totally SUPPORT how you handled the mall episode. (I was a rebel and refused to sell in the malls, etc., and never, never, never used the scripts b/c they were fake. I was the black sheep and called control freak and “negative”, LOL) Anyway, when I read your first post so many things I wanted to say bubbled up, I just couldn’t write about one of them, LOL.. I haven’t read the responses to your initial post, so I may be duplicating what was said… (go figure!) So sorry for the duplication and ramble! I just can’t be brief when it comes to Mary Kay!
When I was sucked into Mary Kay (yeah, they didn’t hold a gun to my head as the saying goes, but bear with me) it was just to sell SKIN CARE and to make some pin money. Man I got saddled with $3800 of inventory FOUR WEEKS before Christmas (I had no one to sell to but family and I come from a small family) which wouldn’t have beens o bad had I only skin care to sell. Each girl is resp. for their inventory meaning you can’t exchange what you don’t like, etc. You ordered it, too bad. Well my director literally ordered my inventory for me with zero input from me. I was told that I WASN’T allowed to choose my own inventory. That I was to give her my credit card # and she would do the picking for me because she was so “experienced”. (LIE!) I didn’t find out about me being resp. until I wanted out of the business…..
I joined to sell skin care and out of all that inventory I only rec’d appx. $500 worth of skin care. The rest was christmas gift boxes, eye shadows, lipsticks, etc. And most importantly, things that my director knew would be obsolete by January. (My director was also my national sales director and NSDs have at least 1.5 years prior notice of inventory change.) So between Christmas gift boxes in November (with no client list) and soon to be obsolete products, what was left but make-up and $500 worth of skin care. How slimy is that, eh? Well let me tell ya, I could go on and on and on about that so let’s just say I took care of things. Even though I was over my 12 mos. cutoff I was still reimbursed for my outstanding inventory. I really left them no choice as much to their chagrin, I had them tightly by the short and curlies. I can’t say how, but they knew better than to f with me at the end of the day. :0)
Here’s how Mary Kay works… The consultant buys the product for $1 and sells for $2. Okay, so she has to recoup the $1 (plus interest) she paid to get the item to sell in the first place.. That is NOT profit. That is called DEBT. Then you have to minus your packaging, shipping and handling, hostess gifts, draws, etc., discount, gas money, coffee $, meeting costs, etc., etc., etc. and what do you have left as profit? *Maybe* $0.25. The girls “think” they have $1.25 profit, (this is not discouraged) and yet they can’t figure out why they are going into major debt being a PAYING distributor for MK. I say paying because MK doesn’t pay any channel a dime to get their product to market. The consultant pays the full retail value of the product, i.e., $9.00 for a lipstick, plus the shipping and handling to sell it for “$18″ in a saturated market/neighbourhood. But I digress….
Which brings me to my point. She will do *anything* to get a face. No face, she’s dusting her inventory level and ultimately she is racking up interest on outstanding inventory debt (investment) not to mention has a significant level of stale inventory because Mary Kay keeps changing their product packaging making whatever she has of “it” on her shelf stale/worthless inventory not depicted in the catalogue any longer. Her director is managing her NOT to bail because any commissions earned on inventory aren’t hers for ONE FULL YEAR (even though she spent her commission cheque as soon as she got it!). That’s right. If Suzy decides to send her inventory back, any commission the director earned on Suzy’s stockpiling has to be paid back to MK Corporate.
The year is rolling on inventory. So it is in the director’s best interest to front load (get the consult to buy a “full wagon”/store from which to sell) the consultant with her initial inventory purchase and then manage her for the full year until she by-passes the one year anniversary of purchasing the inventory and is stuck with whatever is outstanding (as they “tried” to do with me).
If you have a consultant who only purchases a little each month (or only when she has an order which is the way it SHOULD be as product arrives within 3 days of it being ordered) she has a full year to return the product from the day she purchased it. So she can have two years with Mary Kay and still be eligible to return her outstanding inventory if it was purchased within the last 12 calendar months. They don’t tell the girls that though. They just let them believe they can *only* return inventory in their FIRST twelve months.
My experience from being in it and seeing what I saw is that selling that set-up/framework encourages people to be deceitful and duplicitous. Worse, when you bring it up to Corporate they do s.f.a about it.
I totally applaud your aggression. If you hadn’t been aggressive she would’ve cranked up her aggression with her never ending scripts to match every single one of your objections. Sad thing is, you barely made a dent in those rose coloured glasses she wears. I bet she was back at it the next weekend, albeit in another store so she wouldn’t run into “you” again, LOL.
About skin care… I’ve been blessed with really nice skin. I never really had a problem except for one time I was on travel status with my job and the change in water (and soap because I was using a hotel soap) caused such a bad reaction, my WHOLE face erupted and my skin was flaking like some lizard. I was devastated. I could barely speak to the doctor because I was so “ashamed” of how I looked. I was really emotional. Seriously, people take it for granted when they have good skin. It only takes one imbalance for things to change within 2 to 3 days. Literally. So for that c-word to do that to you is totally over the top. There are some elephants in the room that do not need to be acknowledged by a third (unknown!) party.
How would have things gone over if you had said, “what” to her drawing a circle around “your problem” and you sarcastically acting flabbergasted that there even was one… that you had never noticed! Then pick out something really obvious about her and tell her that it was no more a big deal than her (insert whatever affliction she had here.)
B*tch.
In a better world, you could have simply shot her and then gotten a medal from the mayor for doing so. I remember Bloom County’s “Mary Kay Commandos” and how horrible they were. He was right.
Acne is serious b/c it leads to big time depression which can lead to suicide.
I especially think parents with teens experiencing major acne need to help their child get proper medical help.
And I do hope Mary Kay folks train their downline to not approach ppl in the mall to discuss acne.
Susan (5 Minutes for Mom)´s last blog ..Tomorrow My Son Starts Concerta…
Whether a rep of anything or even just a plain independent rude person accosted someone so disrespectfully…Then they deserve ONLY Sh*t-Storm style responses.
BTW …ALL “Direct-Sales” companies..Cookie Lee, Mary K…ALL OF THEM MUST RETURN YOUR MONEY in the FIRST YEAR, and accept back their product..ie: your product investment/your cash. (looks like even longer for MK, for above-post.) They agreed to this as members of the Direct Sales Association or whatever that so-called shiny organization they brag to be members of….They don’t want you to know!…