A Negative Review of “The Patriot Wellness Store” AKA Melaleuca
TL;DR: Melaleuca is an MLM. Don’t buy from MLMs. Save your money and shop elsewhere. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by depending on one merchant to supply all your needs. There are better alternatives out there. //
It all started in the Summer of 2023.
I was getting fed up with the growing number of companies that support depravity and harming society (by way of abortion rights, DEI, made-up pronouns and genders, etc.) and was just beginning to learn of potentially replacing most of the things we get from such companies (e.g., Unilever and P&G, among others) with better alternatives from companies that don’t use harmful ingredients and that are run by either fellow Conservatives or people whose political views are unknown/neutral.
The idea of paying someone who didn’t hate us sounded appealing. We used to get Jeremy’s Razors, sometimes subscribe to The Daily Wire and watch Bentkey shows, and prefer something that may be more expensive if it’s made with better ingredients and/or by people who don’t voice their disdain for half the population.
Enter Melaleuca, or as its reps tend to call it online, “The Patriot Wellness Store.”
Some surface research showed me all the signs of Melaleuca being a multi-level marketing (MLM) company or a pyramid scheme. Even the government is against its practices. For the uninformed, MLM:
is a system for selling goods or services through a network of distributors. Multilevel marketing is also referred to as Network Marketing or Direct Sales.
The AntiMLM Subreddit (A MUST if you’re curious about MLMs.)
A company that functions as an MLM will not only sell stuff (some have their own independent shopping site to better hide the fact that they’re a pyramid scheme), but will also have reps selling/promoting it. Those reps then get a commission (i.e., a portion of the money made) from both those sales AND from what customers that signed up under them purchased.
This is VERY different from an influencer or content creator who merely gets a small commission from something you bought through their Amazon or another link: This person simply gets a portion from YOUR purchase at no extra cost to you.
MLM companies represent a vicious cycle, really, and not one my family supports as we abhor MLMs and don’t buy any products from them.
That is, until Melaleuca came along.
YOU DON’T NEED MELALEUCA.
The premise of Melaleuca (as a customer) is simple: Don’t buy from people that hate you.
By developing hundreds of product lines, Melaleuca takes it a step farther and invites you to downright replace most of the products you already use: Seriously, here’s a Melaleuca catalog showing you everything it manufactures, and below is a longer overview of the company and its products from my former rep (these are texts she sent so everything’s verbatim):
So it’s private, patriot owned, 100% debt free, headquartered in Idaho Falls and competes with Amazon, Target, Walmart, P&G, Johnson&Johnson, Unilever, Clorox, etc., with annual sales of over $2 billion.
The founder is extremely pro-life, calls out the media and gov., put a “contact your representative” page on the website, treats employees amazingly (ex: setup a free grocery “store” inside headquarters when shelves were running low in 2020), donates a ton to conservate candidates, donates a ton to law enforcement, and they are always quick to respond when the country needs help (ex: getting generators to hundreds of Floridians recently). They don’t do ANY woke advertising.
They believe nature holds the answers, science unlocks its secrets and invest in quality, with natural, safer, more effective ingredients & rigorous testing. And—it’s no burden on your budget, simply switching stores! Same $, better spent. Making it SO SIMPLE to vote with your dollars!
They’ve got over 500 family/home essentials — things like: Cleaning, laundry, stain remover, dish soap, fabric spray, disinfectant, wipes, etc., all extremely safe and super effective, made with plant derived and biodegradable ingredients. National brands are mostly water (Ex Method All Purpose is 93% water) but these are so concentrated, so you aren’t paying for water, it requires less fuel for transportation, less plastic, less emissions, and allows for lower pricing, too! No toxic chemicals and no safety caps required—they haven’t ever had an insurance claim on one of their products!! Incredible considering no childproof caps!
Essential oils 10 level tested (the most of any brand I’ve seen), 100% pure, 1st distilled, grown in the native habitat, traceable to the source, harvested with sustainable and ethical practices, and half the price of competitor oils.
Organic, fair trade, small batch roasted mycotoxin free coffee from sustainable farms that is SO fresh and delicious.
Probiotics, vitamins, Methylated Bs, Gatorade alternative, emergen-C alternative, magnesium, bone + joint health, sleep, mood support, semi custom vitamin packs called Peak Performance (this is my absolute TOP recommendation—there have been 4 separate independent studies on them, proven to radically improve 25 key health markers, reduce free radicals + inflammation, 10x more absorbable than most brands, 10x better mineral delivery, & you can even try them for 90 days risk free!)
Protein, advanced fat conversion, aminos, bars, etc. Lots of options and some that make amazing coffee creamer! Theres also a 6 week reset that’s included as being a customer. Special Dietary options with no soy, gluten, or artificial sweeteners. The entire store is non-GMO, but they work with a ton of small farms and it’s an expensive process to become certified so about 4% aren’t yet, but they’d rather work with good small farmers, even if they can’t use the non-GMO labeling yet.
Salon quality, European standard makeup, skin and hair care. Everything from teen acne lines to high end anti-aging retinol alternatives to salon quality hair care. They use real customers as the models in all their photos and don’t do any retouching or editing. Basically all bathroom essentials except toilet paper like toothpaste, deodorant, bath stuff, hand soap, lotions, candles, home fragrance, etc.
Amazing baby and kid lines too. The baby wipes are comparable to WaterWipes but thicker, bigger and better ingredients, lotion, wash, and diaper cream all hypoallergenic, cruelty-free, plant based They even have bandaids and OTC meds like Tylenol and antacid alternatives.
NONE of the products contain any synthetic dyes, unsafe fragrances, formaldehyde, ammonia, bleach, petrochemicals, phthalates, parabens, or heavy metals. All products are tested against leading competitors. For example, the makeup is tested against luxury makeup you’d find in Nordstrom or Sephora. The foundation stick was tested against Tom Ford’s and Bobbi Brown’s. It outperforms, has cleaner ingredients, and is a fraction of the price. ALL products have a 90 day empty bottle gaurantee.
The products are formulated, manufactured, and packaged in America, and customer service (which is amazing!!) is all based here too (99% USA, 1% Canada, and the mascara is made in Italy). Being the manufacturer and distributor is a HUGE deal, as most brands just put their label on other products. Manufacturing their own products allows for more effective quality control, more US jobs, keeps pricing down and eliminates hidden contracts with potentially woke brands or overseas labor.
Approx 63% of the price of most products adds NO value: advertising, middlemen, marketing, retail stores, and a long, expensive distribution chain from the factory > shipping > warehouse > trucking > store > you. The Patriot Wellness Store does not spend on marketing, advertising, middlemen, or a long distribution chain, and instead invests those dollars into higher quality and safer ingredients! So for the same price, the products are much safer, healthier, and effective!
[Here’s a video overview if you’re interested: https://vimeo.com/712296154 (Password: Overview7)]
Alison’s text messages
Here’s the Melaleuca website so you can see for yourself and here’s the Wayback Machine version of the Melaleuca site from December 2023 in case the company decides to hide its front page behind a paywall in the future.
Now that we have that intro out of the way, let’s get into how, despite our contempt for MLMs, I managed to sign up as a CUSTOMER for one.
It’s all social media’s fault
A caveat that I must share: I started to back off all social media in early 2024, partly because I saw no good coming from it, but mostly because I’m more and more interested in a classical education for our homeschool, so learning about it (incl. reading Charlotte Mason’s books + materials from the Charlotte Mason Educational Center), and homemaking, raising two awesome little kids, and occasionally writing on this here blog.. are by no means small feats that leave me no time to waste in getting invested with strangers on social media.
Anyways, one day last Summer I was browsing through some Conservative Mom group, I must’ve come across a post about the latest news from a woke company. Then someone recommended an Instagram user by the name of VoteWithYourDollarMama (her first name is Alison).
Her feed is actually VERY useful to those of us who care about not giving our money to companies that hate us, and one can get a LOT of value and learn a lot from her posts.
But use her feed with CAUTION. I’ve come to see it’s best to just take her news (e.g., some Band-Aids are made with PFAs) as a springboard to then research our own alternatives (e.g., bandages without PFAs) because she recommends Melaleuca a LOT.
Anyways, back then, I trusted her judgment (silly me) and assumed she really was promoting the best of the best whenever she mentioned this “Patriot Wellness Store” thing.
Going back to the Band-Aids example, most recently there was news of many bandages containing harmful chemicals. While she shared Melaleuca’s own safer bandages, I used the news as a starting point to launch my own “investigation” (meaning I went straight to the source of the news and looked for alternatives there). Look up “Mamavation bandages” if you’re so inclined!
But back to 2023-2024. As I’d check out her new and old posts, one thing became clear: She sure talked about this “Patriot Wellness Store” a lot so I thought it had to be worthwhile.
She and I started talking on-and-off, and I was intrigued enough to sign up. I missed out on the $1/year membership fee promotion from last Summer so we instead sign up for ~$20/year earlier this year.
Signing up isn’t easy
Because of the overwhelming amount of products that Melaleuca offers, something that’s annoying about signing up is the survey you fill out where you’re asked which of the following several dozen+ product categories are you either running out of, already stocked up on, or don’t need any of. It’s an onboarding process no customer should go through.
Based on one’s answers (e.g., “I need to get shampoo soon; I already have plenty of dishwashing pods; I don’t need multivitamins”), your rep sends you a shopping/wish list with all the products you can choose from.
If you go crazy, you can easily spend thousands on this first order, but there was no way I was going to budget more than $100 on these replacements. Thankfully, she sent me items we didn’t need.
Because that’s another thing: They try to get you to want to try stuff you didn’t ask for, almost like a fear tactic?
But I’m done with fear-based accounts: the information overload is overwhelming and I don’t need to know it all. Just show me which products have PFAs, which companies hate people like us, and let me research alternatives on my own.
The minimum order requirement is another turn-off
This is something that I’m 100% sure Melaleuca will never change so don’t even bother signing up to try it out and later cancel.
A minimum order requirement is completely unnecessary and antiquated. The rep explained that the roughly $80-100/month (or 35+ “points”) such an order costs is based off what a single old lady would want.
And if you don’t place an order or forgot to choose what to buy, random stuff that you didn’t buy gets shipped to you!
But we’re not a single, old lady that absolutely depends on her monthly order of multivitamins. There ARE better alternatives out there; I can go a few days/weeks without a multivitamin.
The company’s protein powders, which are these complex concoctions that contain a laundry list of ingredients, aren’t at all what’s recommended one consume after a workout, so just right there we saw a huge fail.
None of Melaleuca’s products are life-saving so I fail to see the reasoning behind such a seemingly altruistic intention other than because IT WANTS TO MAKE SURE IT’S ALWAYS COLLECTING MONEY FROM YOU. Which isn’t altruistic at all.. and if you think about it, it’s a sh*tty way of doing business considering how easy 99% of companies out there work.
Melaleuca isn’t part of “an alternative economy”
Melaleuca is portrayed as being part of an “alternative economy” (the reps’ words–not mine) whereby shoppers buy from a Conservative company to combat woke corporations and others that make products using questionable ingredients.
But what Melaleuca fails to realize is that multi-level marketing companies don’t make up an “alternate economy” in the slightest. A company asking its customers to consider referring other people for the potential of earning additional income (MLM-style) doesn’t fall under the alternate economy umbrella. Simply shopping from a website that requires a membership* (Sam’s Club-, Costco-, and Thrive Market-style) doesn’t fall under this category, either.
(*Note: You don’t need to be an actual member to shop from Melaleuca dot com, but paying the membership fee does make everything cheaper. Its non-member prices make everything more expensive and not worthwhile. [It being an MLM also makes everything not worthwhile but you already knew that.])
Local Co-ops (where you sign up to buy curated baskets of meats and/or produce from neighbors), patronizing your local farmers and ranchers, and even bartering would actually represent alternate economies.
Pyramid schemes are just scams.
Quitting is a pain in the butt as well
If your rep tells you that all you have to do to cancel your Melaleuca membership is simply “send an email,” they’re lying. Maybe they don’t know better, but they’re still lying.
No, to cancel your membership, you must:
- Send an email stating you want to cancel
- Click a link you get in an email response from the company
- That link takes you to another form you fill out…
- …before you’re taken to ANOTHER form that you must fill out (acknowledging that you understand you’re leaving behind $X “Loyalty Dollars”)…
- PRINT, SIGN, SCAN, AND mail/email to the right (email) address.
As if the signup process hadn’t been bad enough!
Now, you may think that you’ll get your membership fee back after trying it out for a month. WRONG!
As it turns out, you’ll supposedly only get it back if you cancel within 30 days–something no one will tell you until you find out while trying to cancel after 30 days. But I didn’t think that was fair, so I emailed the cancellation email address and asked for my money back, stating something along the lines of, “A company that prides itself on its American values shouldn’t keep money its customers are entitled to have refunded because they cancelled a service.” I successfully got our membership fee back shortly afterwards.
Fortunately, Congress is working to change that. Hopefully we’ll see companies with shady and complex cancellation practices change their ways soon, but who knows when that’ll actually happen. After cancelling my membership, I told my rep about how difficult it was to quit and about how the government would be doing something about it, and never heard back.
Later I’ll be sharing a way to help you outsmart subscription services
