East City Bookshop welcomes Bridget Read to discuss her book, Little Bosses Everywhere.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT LITTLE BOSSES EVERYWHERE

A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society.

Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality.

In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos. Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn.

A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.

Bridget Read is a features writer at New York magazine, reporting on housing inequality and the real estate industry for Curbed. Previously, she wrote for The Cut and was a culture writer at Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Rebecca Traister is writer-at-large at New York Magazine, where she covers politics, media, and culture from a feminist perspective. Traister has written for The New Republic, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, the Washington Post, Elle, and other publications. Winner of a 2018 National Magazine Award and 2016 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, Traister is the author of Good and Mad, a New York Times best seller and among the Washington Post and People’s ten best books of 2018; All the Single Ladies, a New York Times best seller and Notable Book of 2016; and Big Girls Don't Cry, a Times notable book of 2010. She is at work on a new book.