Jenny's Barmy Booster Bravado

Today, Jenny posted this:

I've included her member count to demonstrate that her claim, as if you didn't know, runs completely against reality. The fact is that her Facebook page number is still going down; at the start of the year it was at 537. This means that Jenny's losing on average a person a day so far this year. But sure, don't let that change your sales pitch.

You've no doubt read in my past posts a number of times where I have mentioned the booster, JP's wonder product that Jenny treats like manna from heaven. But what, exactly, is the booster?

Allow me to finally explain. JP's booster is nothing more than glucomannan and caffeine as you can see in their own product description. Glucomannan is used as a dietary supplement to help reduce hunger cravings, thus companies like JP use them in their weight loss products. The cost of this product is anyone's guess - Jenny has never mentioned how much she charges for them - but I have no doubt that it will be excessive for what the product is really worth.

The saddest thing here is that if Jenny ever bothered researching nutrition then she would realise that she can get this booster product for much cheaper. It is called - guess what - fruit. You know, the very stuff that JP markets its products as containing.

The difference between fruit and JP products is that fruit contains fibre which glucomannan acts as a substitute for. That is why it isn't rocket science to pick an apple over a chocolate bar when you're hungry; the fibre adds to the snack and makes you less hungry during the day. That's why I, personally, always have grapes in the fridge if I ever have an urge to snack. JP inexplicably doesn't think fibre is helpful so extract it from their capsules to keep a handful of vitamins. I have just checked their shakes, however, that do contain fibre.

So in summary, once again, JP are marketing products that are simply unnecessary if someone is committed to weight loss. I am not denying that the booster could help someone with weight loss if it was marketed at a more appropriate price. Unfortunately, as is typical of JP, the wellbeing of people comes secondary to profit and distributors like Jenny are encouraged to sell these boosters for as high a price as they can get away with. Meanwhile, fruit is conveniently never mentioned which does the exact same job for cheaper (and more tastier to boot).

So will Jenny get orders? I doubt it. I believe she sold a few last time the boosters were stocked but otherwise as shown earlier in this post people are continuing to leave the page and her posts remain unanswered.

On a final note, remember her £100 raffle prize for December orders? A winner was never declared. I don't think it's because this was a scam, I think it was because she did not receive a single order in the whole month. But no worries, Jenny will get super marketing tips when she makes that Birmingham "business trip" in April.

More "Testimonies" from Juice Plus

Recently Jenny has got back onto the wagon in line with her New Years resolution, declaring that she is back on the JP capsules and adding a booster drink to her lunches. She doesn't exactly mention what else is included in her lunches or what she eats on a daily basis. As such, it probably means these capsules and shakes will make no impact if Jenny continues to overeat.

Anyway, in the last week Jenny has posted two more testimonies to encourage people to take on the shakes. The first one isn't a stranger to my blog; it is Clara's before and after photos complete with a cringey message from Jenny:

 

 

I have already written about Clara in previous blogs as she appears to be the golden girl of the JP branch for this area. Basically she was overweight and lost it thanks to JP. She then, inspired by these products, got involved as a distributor,made barrel loads of money (which led to a big house, fancy car, early retirement for both herself and her husband) and is now determined to help other distributors achieve their dream of making big money in the franchise.

It's frankly rich that Jenny, who is obese, can dictate to people that there are "no excuses" for not losing weight. Yes, that's Jenny saying so. If Clara's only problems were maintaining a house and taking care of two children, then gosh what a poor hard done by little soul. There's working parents out there, many of whom are single, who have to work as well as take care of the kids and home and yet a number of them have no problem whatsoever in losing or maintaining a healthy weight. It's all to do with willpower. If Clara's only problems were that of a simple housewife then frankly it's shameful that she was even fat in the first place.

Jenny then linked to a testimony made by a man I shall call Dave. I'd do my usual quote-n-dissect routine but there's too much text, many of which doesn't really say anything. I'll just summarise Dave's key points.

Basically, Dave says he wants to address the concerns raised by the "pyramid scheme" that is JP. Right away he had my attention; was somebody finally going to explain how JP is not a scam? Well, sadly no, Dave doesn't address this issue.

He starts by saying that he is a level three nutritional PT, master PT and a GP referrel (?). Basically, look at me, I'm a fitness person. Dave then says this which should be a massive red flag to anyone:

"I don't understand science studies so I asked someone who did to check them out to which they said were VERY impressive."

Okay. So Dave, despite listing qualifications to make himself sound an authority on health and nutrition, couldn't understand the JP studies on the products. He got a mysterious person to read them for him, who were then impressed with the findings. Right okay, that definitely happened.

Regarding the sugar content in JP shakes Dave says:

"The "high" sugar content, we can all use lovely technical terms and explain things that go on inside the body but let me keep this simple.
It is from natral sources
If you picked a mango from a tree strawberries from a field you wouldn't know or worry about the grams of natural sugar"

That's not a "lovely technical term", it's plain English. High means "a lot of", sugar means sugar, "content" is what it contains. If you think that is difficult for the everyday person to understand then I dread to think of British standards of English.

The real issue however is when Dave says "you wouldn't know or worry about the grams of natural sugar". That's just an outright lie. 100 grams worth of mango has 14 grams of sugar; 100 grams of strawberries have 4.9 grams. I found that out in literally two minutes by doing a Google search.

Furthermore, you should be worrying about the amount of sugar you eat in your diet. Sugar is without doubt the worst offender for high calorie intake; that's why there is a nationally-recommended level for the amount men and women should eat in a day. That they come from fruit makes no difference - sugar is still sugar - and if you stuff your face with too much fruit, you'll still gain weight. You don't earn brownie points because the sugar so happened to come from an apple rather than a cake.

Deflecting the issue from the JP products to fruit also doesn't hide the fact that JP shakes still have sugar, so why Dave decided to talk about fruit is beyond me.

Dave then goes on a tangent about how the wonder JP products have helped his hair, nails etc - the usual spiel - so there is nothing much more to add here except that he doesn't remotely mention that JP products do not contain fibre like fruit does. As such people are wasting money by missing out on a natural suppressant that would help them feel fuller and less inclined to eat. That's why people like Jenny waste money on both the shakes and a "booster" product which does the same thing for much more.

To finish, it appears that Jenny probably didn't read the comments in Dave's post:

Why would Dave leave JP if it is so profitable that it can earn you six figures within two years? The mind wonders.

How much does it cost for a Juice Plus Convention?

 

It's all systems go as Jenny and her "team" prepare for the 2016 Juice Plus Convention in Birmingham.

The convention apparently gives distributors like Jenny the opportunity to rub shoulders with the big players of the company. It is an opportunity to build your network, establish contacts and get wealth-generating tips on how to grow your JP business into a mega bucks industry.

So far, as documented on this blog, Jenny's sales and recruitment figures have been awful. At best, she currently has three distributors recruited and made a couple of sales earlier this month. Currently, the number of people in her Facebook page is now 537. That means that if she were to sell £20 worth of stock to each person in that number (for the sake of argument assuming every one is a unique person not including me, herself or distributors), she would make £10,740. That's without taking into account tax and the amount that goes to JP and her uplines. That's horrendous figures for a company that she has claimed can make you a six figure sum in less than two years.

Anyway, to the convention. When people go on business trips, as Jenny has decided to call this, the person's travel and accommodation expenses are covered by the employer/whoever he/she is representing. If I personally were to be representing my boss at an event, I would stand to be reimbursed. That's how these things work.

But not for JP. For a company that's all about including people in the get-rich-quick scheme, they sure seem very reluctant to help their distributors with the cost of attending these events.

So how much does it cost to attend a JP convention? I tallied together three key issues: the cost of travel, the cost of accommodation and the cost, if any, for attendance. As the conference is a Friday and Saturday event I assume Jenny will be heading there on the Thursday and leaving the Sunday morning. Here are the results.

1) Flight tickets

Last time, Jenny and her "team" flew to the convention which I assume they will be doing again. How much is the cheapest from Jenny's nearest airport to Birmingham?

 

£109.

2) Cost of accommodation

I went for a typical budget hotel chain you get here in the UK.I have no doubt you can probably find a better deal with a bit of digging, but I generally could not be bothered so assume this is an average rate for a three night stay in Birmingham.

£190.50.

3) Cost of attendance

Would you be shocked if I told you that yes, JP charge their distributors to attend the convention? To be honest I don't think you would be. I mean, it should be what, a tenner/£15 max in order to spread the cost of hiring out that big centre, right?

£50. Five zero. Fifty. And that's for the early bird ticket otherwise you have to pay £60 and a £4.25 booking fee. That's roughly the cost of a ticket to see an Arsenal FC match at the Emirates stadium. It's double the cost of a typical standing ticket to see a pop star like Justin Bieber. So how on earth does it cost so much to hear people tell you you're going to get rich? Well, JP doesn't say.

The overall cost of travel, accommodation and attendance of the Juice Plus 2016 Birmingham Convention stands at £349.50.

That figure doesn't even take into account other factors such as the cost of inter-city transport, the cost of food, the cost of alcohol at the "glam party" or the cost of merchandise Jenny and her "team" may buy at the convention. To cover that, Jenny would need to sell an average £20 JP product to 17.4 people - and that would be assuming that she got 100% of the sales, which she wouldn't.

The conclusion? This is a very costly business trip to hear people give you advice on how to make money. It doesn't seem to register to Jenny that a core concept of business is to keep costs low. Whatever profit you make goes up in smoke if you continue to blow away money on nonsense like this.

But JP don't care. They're making money out of the very people who think they'll be getting rich off JP. Something about biting the hand that feeds you springs to mind.

Enjoy your trip, Jenny.

You've failed already, Jenny

This has got to be the saddest attempt at weight loss I have ever seen. Everything in there is just plain wrong.

1. "Once you over indulge" implies that it is inevitable that you are going to overeat this Christmas. That's simply not true. There is nothing stopping you from saying "no thanks" to an extra slice of Christmas pudding. Learn a little self-control.

2. This begs the question of what JP actually does to help people lose weight. Really, all someone needs to do to lose weight is to eat less. That's all there is to it. Simple changes that can help achieve this cost nothing - the one that springs to mind most of all is to cut out calory-dense drinks with water or sugar-free cola.

3. I have never understood why people wait until New Years day to make changes. There is nothing stopping you from making these changes right now. When I started my weight loss journey it began in late October 2014; by the time New Years day came along I already had two months worth of progress to motivate me into the year.

The above point is why I know already that Jenny's health kick is doomed to fail. She has absolutely no self-control, she has absolutely no motivation. Jenny will use the remaining week of 2015 to stuff her face with junk, knowing that her kick doesn't kick off until 2016. When it comes along, she'll struggle bad, she'll cheat on meals, she'll give up the gym, and then it's back to square one by February.

And in all that time, she'll be asking people to buy "healthy" JP junk and to listen to her weight loss advice. You couldn't make it up.

Facebook count: 538. Will we reach below 500? Time will tell, but I actually think we will.

A Double Whammy for Jenny

Two posts today.

The top one was a "lol" moment that should, once again, tell Jenny that demand for JP products is extremely low in this group. Barely anybody except her fellow distributors respond to them.

This time, Jenny decided to ask people how much weight they would like to "loose" (sic) this New Year and gave people a choice of emojis to use. You'd think that the blonde lady's response would be encouraging - a possible sale perhaps - but no, because the emoji she used corresponded to "happy with the weight I am". I have no doubt that Jenny hated "liking" that post.

The second post is a brilliant example of why stupid people shouldn't use analogies. In my earlier, sad ass days, I'd spend a couple hours a day arguing on internet forums. One thing I learned is that many people out there simply do not understand how analogies work. For the comparison to be valid, the two things need to have similar, if not the same, qualities.

Jenny's cut-n-paste job is a fantastic flavour of stupid, claiming that as a piece of jewellery may go up in value, so too can your Juice Plus business to the tune of a six figure income within two years.

There's plenty of reasons for why that is just nonsense. To start with, jewellery, to my knowledge, does not go "up" in value other than with inflation. If you buy a ring that is worth £69, then chances are you have bought a tacky piece of junk that doesn't even have real jewels in it. It's the kind of crap you would buy from Argos.

Second, the chances of your JP "business" shooting up to six figures by just paying £50 is insane. This goes back to Clara who Jenny sees as a kind of demi-god who apparently joined the franchise then started rolling in crazy sums of money. Ignore that she's a thin, attractive woman who is perfect to model the JP "health" image, ignore that nothing is said about her husband's career who could well be funding their lifestyle moreso than she is, ignore the fact that she does not explain remotely how she made that amount of alleged income.

That last point is important. As mentioned plenty of times on this blog already, the JP model flies in the face of business common sense. Businesspeople do not want to sell away parts of their business if it means others may well be getting profits and saturating the market. It only works for franchises (i.e. McDonalds) and pyramid schemes like JP because the companies/people who do buy into the business are obliged to turn in some, if not most of, the profits back to the company. The people at the top make the big money and the people at the bottom, like Jenny, get the scraps.

For someone like Jenny to become a big earner requires her to sign up hundreds, if not thousands, of distributors and sell the products like hotcakes. But in order to sign up more people, she has to saturate the market; she has to increase competition in her catchment area so more people in her city and beyond are looking for people to sell and get recruited into the company. Recruiting people into the company is only good for Jenny is she instigates it and thus gets a slice of commission. Other people joining new members means nothing for her.

Does this sound like a business model that, within two years, will have you rolling in money even as you sleep? Of course not.

I also note that in Jenny's recent profile picture her arm is up. Underneath is horrifically sagging skin due to excess weight. I'm saying this again not to be rude against her, to make fun of her, but to be brutally honest: she is obese. It is the upmost of cheek for her to think that she can advise people to make healthy life choices.

Jenny, heed your own advice. 2015 was a wasted year. How about you make 2016 a year of proper change where you first of all educate yourself on health, nutrition and diet, leave this scam of a business that has no interest in you making money and earn some self-respect instead of being a fat-assed hypocrite.

The choice is yours, Jenny.

Updates from Jenny's Juice Plus Farce

Reminder: "Jenny" is a fictional name for a Juice Plus (JP) peddler who is ironically obese yet sells health products as if they are wonder products. She is a 21st century snake oil saleswoman. All efforts are made to keep her real identity anonymous.

So, it's been a while since my  last post, what has Jenny been up to?

The short answer is just "the usual". Spamming recruitment and sales posts. New "team" members? Zero. Sales? Two. Fantastic results for a sure-fire-way-to-make-money business.

Since my last post that exposed Jenny's incident with advertising standards, she has actually launched a new promotion: buy a JP product from her in December and you enter a draw to win £100. Wowee! It appears that nobody was tempted by this deal, so after a couple of posts about it Jenny has swept this promotion under the rug.

A post she made today spurred me on to type this one up. It's nothing different, it's yet another recruitment pitch that exposes JP for the pyramid scheme that it is.

You'd think the penny would drop for Jenny but... no. She has either deluded herself into believing the rubbish shovelled up by JP or she genuinely does not have the intelligence to figure out why this is a scam.

Just because your friends may get fed up of seeing your spam doesn't mean that they are bad people; it means that they have got fed up seeing you, their friend, gullibly fall for what is nothing more than a scam. That's not their issue, it's yours.

Furthermore, again, as I've said before, the international aspect of JP is meaningless. A customer in Canada is going to buy from a distributor in Canada; they are not going to think "hmm, I know someone in the UK who sells this stuff, I'll buy it from them!"

The haters don't pay your wages, sure, but your employer - JP - pays a ridiculous rate based on your commission and recruitment figures. That's why it's so important for you to recruit people; it's about their sales from membership subscriptions and commission, not because they want the average person on the street to get rich. The "haters" are just normal people who can see a scam for what it is.

Finally, it's not negativity from stopping people joining JP. It's reality. In reality, JP is a scam. In reality, business is not a big yay-lets-hug-each-other-and-make-a-big-club-where-everyone-in-it-makes-cash. The dream business environment is domination of the market with a never-ending demand for your product, which is completely against the JP model of saturating the market with distributors which in turn reduces demand and customers at the same time.

Since the last post, Jenny's Facebook count is down to 543. I'm amazed that still, in December, there is a steady decline in her group numbers. I always think that we've reached the bedrock of people who are friends, family or oblivious to being members. But the counter still goes down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Jenny's Slap on the Wrist from Advertising Standards

Jenny has this knack of starting promotions but never really persisting with them. In the last few weeks this has included her "Christmas Challenge", which as mentioned in a previous post, appeared to be nothing more than her beginning to use the "Booster" product that JP had started selling. The launch date came and went without incident, and nothing has been said of it since.

This also include's Jenny's attempt to stir up attention by posting a fitness jpeg that had a list of exercises she promised to do all of based on each comment the post received. Thus for every comment she would do 20 star jumps, 10 sit-ups, 30 squats, you get the idea. She received 7/8 comments, then said she would carry through with her challenge the next day... and never did. So that was another empty promotion.

Of particular significance was Jenny's relatively short run of doing competitions. You get the idea, like and share the post, enter the competition, hopefully you win a prize. Nothing amazing, pretty much every company does this on social media from time to time and Jenny was no different.

That was, until, she posted this:

My first thought upon reading that was that she had totally lost the plot and was going to be giving away pretty much all of her capsules to people who liked and shared that status. It does, after all, say that this is a freebie promotion for one month's supply of capsules. So basically, like and share, and get your capsules, right?

Well, it worked, people were liking and sharing that post. Buoyed by this reaction, Jenny continued her pitch:

 And again, people did. They wanted their free month's supply of capsules so liked and shared that status. I mean, it's free pills!

Along came the deadline...

 

 

*CAR SCREECH*

Sorry, what?

"will announce the winner of the vineyard capsules tomorrow!

"Thank you to everyone who entered

"Look out for more prizes soon"

"winner... entered... prizes..."

Okay, so despite her previous posts clearly saying this was a freebie for one months supply with no mention of this being a competition, it turns out that this was, apparently, another competition. So no, you didn't get a free supply for liking and sharing the post, as she advertised, you simply got the opportunity to get a free month's supply.

Call me petty - it could well be that she is simply an utter idiot who didn't understand what she was typing - but to me this was out and out false advertising whether she meant it or not. As a result I contacted Advertising Standards and was absolutely amazed when I got this response (red are my edits):

Dear BAJ,

 

Your Complaint: Jenny

 

Thank you for your continued patience and sending the ads to us. I note you raised concerns that Jenny's ads do not make clear that the promotion was a competition, and that only a few individuals would win the prize.

 

We think you’ve made a valid point, and with a view to acting quickly, we contacted the advertiser and requested changes.  I’m happy to advise that the advertiser has provided their assurance that they will ensure all their future promotions will clearly state where there are only a select number of winners.

 

We will now close our files on this matter. Basic information including the company name, the industry sector and the medium in which the ad appeared will appear on our website... in a list with other advertisers that have co-operated in resolving complaints.

 

I do hope that this outcome is satisfactory to you, and finally I’d like to thank you for taking the time and trouble to bring this matter to our attention.

 

 

Kind regards,

 

Betty Smith (edit)

Complaints Executive

 

So, there you have it. Jenny either let her dishonesty get to her head to squeeze out reactions on her page, or she was so stupid she didn't understand basic advertisement ethics. Either way, just like her "Christmas Challenge", just like her exercise-for-comments pledge, the promotions have simply disappeared. It appears that the chances of winning a free supply of capsules... are gone... *sniff*.

 

Facebook page count: 558. I think we're down to the base number now consisting of her friends, family, fellow distributors and people oblivious to the fact that they're members of this page.