If being a good governor means serving as a cheerleader and chief booster for local industry, then Utah's former chief executive, Jon Huntsman Jr., did a solid job. He has been touting his stewardship of the state's economy on the campaign trail. But one thriving industry in Utah that Huntsman helped—and which supported him financially in return—relies on dubious practices.Utah is home to the nation's largest concentration of companies built around the practice of multilevel marketing, which is widely considered to be a type of pyramid scheme. While Huntsman was governor, he did his part to keep them in business.
Known as MLMs, these companies often sell overpriced nutritional supplements or other health products, not through retail outlets but rather through networks of individual distributors. Among the signature companies in Utah are Nu Skin, Usana, Tahitian Noni Beverages, and Nature's Sunshine Products. Instead of relying on consumer sales, they make their real revenue from constantly recruiting more salespeople, who usually have to "invest" in the opportunity to sell the products and then must recruit their own network of distributors to make money. Most distributors at the bottom of the pyramid never make the big bucks promised by the company. Because of this structure, these types of companies are frequent targets of law enforcement, federal regulators, and consumer lawyers.