[ELI5] How governments allow snake oil “medicine” to sell on TV, light night? Some of these products are dangerous to people, like prostate crap that will do nothing and may prevent the people to survive if diagnosed too late?
In: 1634
One thing that I don’t see covered here…
Speaking as someone that’s worked in questionable marketing spaces; a lot of it also comes down to the ability to enforce the ability. There are far more scams and questionable products out there than there are resources to tackle them all. Plenty of them just fly under the radar until they somehow attract enough attention to actually get investigated.
The government is not your friend nor is it a parent. It’s a collection of wealthy/connected people managing a business for other wealthy people. That business looks out for you only in as far as it benefits them and if something falls below the threshold of their self interest then it’s not a priority for them.
Stupid is as stupid does. The people that buy that crap aren’t smart enough or are too ignorant to know better.
So if people will buy it, people will keep selling it as long as there are disclaimers.
[removed]
Greed baby, america is all about that mighty dollar. Never ever think that politicians have your best interest in mind, they do not. We the people need to stand up for change.
Short answer…in the US supplements are not regulated by the FDA. Those “meds” could have anything in them.
The vitamin and supplement “industry”, particularly coming out of places like Utah, had a very large lobby of well-funded individuals to fight against absolute FDA labeling of “mere supplements” “as if they were medicines”. So as long as you don’t claim to treat a specific ailment or function as a specific kind of medication, you can sell “supplements.”
As with all such matters in the United States, the laws of capitalism dictate that the money makes the rules rather than the welfare of the citizenry.
I believe John Oliver did a pretty good treatment of the supplement industry not too long ago. It also comes up under the multi-level marketing schemes episodes as the claims that cross the threshold are disclaimed by the MLM for being unauthorized, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and such like that.
If anyone’s curious how some of these types of operations work, here’s a little “peek behind the curtain”. A long time ago (nearly 20 years ago now), I worked for one of those snake oil call centers. Our particular company sold many, many different varieties of supplements, up to and including “female enhancement supplements”, which for me was super awkward being a male. I can’t even tell you the number of times I got hung up on as soon as they heard my voice on the other end of the phone. The company also cold-called previous customers to see if they wanted to reorder any of the products, though thankfully that wasn’t my department and I never had to do that. I only handled inbound calls.
Our products were sold mostly in TV and radio infomercials (if anybody remembers Pax-TV on cable/satellite, our products were very frequently shown on that channel and there were TONS of people who called to order them after seeing them there), but we also used shorter “spot” commercials all over the place. The commercials involved a pitchman/pitchwoman conducting an “interview”, and someone else pretending to be an “expert” (in fact, a couple of our pitchpeople were called “Doctor ________”, and while one of them was in fact a chiropractic doctor, I’m pretty sure none of the others were, or at least they didn’t act like they were).
Here’s the interesting thing about the way our company did business – we never, never, never told anyone the prices of our products on the TV/radio. You ALWAYS had to call to get the price so that the phone rep could try to “sell” you the product. For many of our products it was not a particularly hard task, but for others it certainly was. But we were also tasked with not just selling the original product but also “cross selling” – offering customers who buy the main product the “opportunity” to purchase other things. There were financial incentives to us call reps for doing this, similar to the way tellers at Bank of America are given financial incentives to get you to sign up for their credit card.
We as phone representatives were given a specific “script” we had to use with callers so that we didn’t run afoul of “false advertising” or other similar claims. The wording on the scripts was drawn up by specific attorneys to make sure we kept it on the up-and-up (as much as possible).
As other commenters here have said, supplements are not FDA-regulated, hence why their approval process is much more “vague” than actual drugs. But on the phone, we were told to tell callers who ask about us being “FDA approved” that our supplements “are produced in an FDA-approved factory”. Technically not wrong, but not very factual either considering that the FDA doesn’t “approve” factories at all, they just didn’t shut ours down (yet). So there’s that.
We were paid a flat hourly rate (I think mine was either minimum wage or not far above it) plus commission plus occasional cash incentives for performance. We made commission from every sale, but also made more if a certain percentage of our calls resulted in sales and made even more for the more cross-selling we did.
It was an emotional roller coaster working there, honestly. The pay was really quite good if you were on top of your game and made a lot of sales (I remember some weeks where I averaged $30+/hour or even more for my time working). It also absolutely sucked if you weren’t/didn’t (minimum wage was quite a bit below what it is today).
Last detail I’ll share (thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far! 👍🏻) – The most lucrative time of the week for sales? Sunday mornings between about 6am and 10am eastern time. Much, much higher sales percentages during that time span than any other time of the week. That always kinda surprised me.
America is set up in a way that allows predatory practices for businesses, based on the (false) notion that “the consumer is smart enough to know when they’re being lied to”. It’s not just medicine, it’s political misinformation on cable news, it’s advertising, it’s a LOT of first-amendment stuff.
Latest Answers