Now that Pampered Chef, the multi-level marketing company owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has a new CEO, MLM expert and dean of the College of New Jersey School of Business Bill Keep is hoping to get some support in setting clearer standards on what is or is not a pyramid scheme.
To do that, he’s published a letter that he sent to Warren Buffett earlier this year, with no response, possibly hoping to get the attention of the Pampered Chef CEO Tracy Britt Cool.
“I ask that you consider, as an owner of an MLM company, the value of having clear and public standards that differentiate a legal MLM from a pyramid scheme,” Bill Keep wrote in the letter, dated August 25, which he tweeted today. “Should you conclude that such standards are important to protect consumers and investors, I ask that you publicly address the issue.”
Bill Keep: No standard for what separates MLM and pyramid schemes
As Bill Keep and others have explained before, when you’re trying to figure out if a company is a legal MLM or apyramid scheme, the central question is whether their revenue comes from primarily from selling goods or from recruitment. But more sophisticated pyramid schemes also make some amount