Independent Business Owner – Charlie Chitty

January 27, 2020

Phase 1: Blueberry Pie/Apple Fritter/Chocolate Fudge/Strawberry Shortcake

 

I remember when the package first arrived, minimalist and slick, and I ripped off the tape and pulled out the bars. Plain plastic packaging in blue, green, brown and pink. But yet somehow they looked aesthetically pleasing. Simple to behold. I still get a kick after receiving my seventieth box, Although I never ate any of the bars. You didn’t eat your own product. You just hoarded it and took pictures. Only idiots eat their own supply.

I snapped a pic, fanning the bars out across my coffee table and selected my filter and hashtags. I made sure to do at least three Wonderbar posts per week, with two pictures of my new car or my another part of my new house extension, and then two will be text-based motivational quotes because it’s what the algorithms demand.

I’ve been into Wonderbar since the beginning, since Mac Moormony’s first Wonderbar Seminar (Although back then he called them Wonderbar Talks and they took place in the cellar of a local library at 8pm after it shut and we all had to make sure to be very quiet and use only the back entrance because the front door had an alarm.)

I think it’s the fact that I’ve been with this company for as long as I have that gets me results. Technically, there was a Phase 0, where only the Blueberry Pie Wonderbars were introduced to Wondersellers, but we’re not strictly supposed to talk about that.

Thankfully, this is just a personal diary, so I think I’ll be just fine.

I’m currently making $100,500 a month from my downline, and their downline, and their downline. There’s ten people directly underneath me, and I’ve ensured there’s ten people they have below them and ten people directly below them. Ten times ten times ten is one thousand. I make one thousand from every person who sells Wonderbars. And I’m certain they make money too, they always seem so happy and eager when they see me at meetings.

I actually have to give a little speech somewhere down in Miami next week and I’ve spent the majority of this month’s picking out pictures from my “poor days” and I’ve narrowed it down to about six, one of which is actually me now but the people in the audience don’t need to know that. I just bought some powdered milk, propped it up in an alley and added a greyscale filter. It looks really good.

 

Phase 2: Vanilla Ice Cream/Treacle Tart/Liquorice Laces/Lemon Tart

 

I mean, honestly, this is almost too easy. I have boxes upon boxes of white packets and orange packets and black packets and yellow packets. I bought absolutely nothing myself, a lot of it is inventory I received from people underneath me quitting and sending their starter kits back. I just bundle them right back up and send them out to the new recruits coming in every day.

I don’t even charge for the kits, I ship them right out and they start buying more Wonderbar inventory immediately. It’s fantastic! And everyone just keeps getting richer and richer!

I’m pulling in $1,000,000 every damn months! I have two lambos, a rented mansion in Hollywood and last week I even attended the Met Gala!

It’s weird, but I have this feeling that everything’s just going to keep getting better. We hit a bit of a rough patch when Susan Jenkins, a member of the downline who was always a little bit loopy started making health claims about our Wonderbars that it cured cancer and cured arthritis and cured blindness. Apparently she’d taken out bank loans to stock product and get a bunch of expensive stuff to make it seem as if she was really raking in money. Then the loan sharks came after her and she had to push stock.

I can understand it, but it would never happen to me. Frankly, she should have just been better at the selling and sold Wonderbars without lying. These crunchy bastards frankly sell themselves. Although some are chewy. 

There’s talk on the internet that it’s manufacturing errors because they can’t produce the bars fast enough, but that’s mostly the haters and internet trolls who can’t sell.

In fairness, I haven’t sold the bars for a while. I don’t need to, my there downlines do it for me and I just make a little bit of sweet dough on the side from commish. Sometimes I try and do the maths on how much I’d make if I sold the bars myself. Probably billions, maybe. I never actually passed maths when I went to high school, but my parents always taught me that I was smart.

I’d like to see my maths teacher in his broken down Hyundai seeing me now!

I’ve already booked three vacations for this year. Hawaii, Perisau and New York. I need to get pics of the beach, of the snow lodge and of the city so I can put more pics on my Instagram so more people sign up underneath me. As Mac always says, “Show that life, to get that life!”

God, that man is smart.

 

Phase 3: Full Product Rollout including Carrot Cake/White Chocolate Brownie/Peach Cobbler/Berry Bar/Granola and Oat/Raisin Bran

 

He isn’t smart.

Mac Moormoney is a genius, an absolute genius.

On rollout, all the six new bars are in clear packaging and they’ve increased the size of each box. In the meantime, Mac bought out all the energy bar competition, sweeping all the supermarket shelves clear of anything but Wonderbars.

In the meantime he kept the original eight colours in circulation, displaced randomly in boxes as “Throwpacks” Get it? Like Throwback? Genius! It works because a lot of Wondersellers seem to enjoy gambling. I don’t know why.

Mac noticed a lot of sellers were opening their own products, so he wanted to make it fun by adding an old school bar here and there that Wondersellers can sell for whatever they want. And in the meantime, early access Wondersellers found their stock rising in value by about eight times!

It sucks though, because I still have idiots who suck at selling. I have four levels of downline now, but there’s people who still eat their own stock using lame arguments like “I didn’t have any food in the house” or “Nobody’s buying it anymore because the market is too full of sellers and no buyers.”

That, of course, is loser-talk. Loser-talk, loser-talk, loser-talk! Everyone makes excuses and talks, but there’s a time to stop talking and start doing. When you die, you get remembered for what you did, not what you talked about doing.

That’s what Mac talks about on his podcasts and on his late-night talk show. He replaced Seth Myers. It was kinda sad, but all Seth did was tell jokes. Mac does motivational videos, trading information, selling tips, what bars are moving and which aren’t. You know, content that actually matters, you know?

I’ve lost track of how much money I’ve made. It’s not a billion yet, but it’s getting close. I’m on some Forbes list and have been offered three book deals. I’ve taken them, but I’ll need to get a ghostwriter or something.

I can’t actually write. This is a dictaphone-to-text thingy. I’ve been dyslexic my whole life and actually haven’t held a pen in seventeen years. And now I’ve got three book deals.

It’s like Mac always says “When you believe in the universe, it will give you its gifts no matter what.”

Sounds corny, but true. Three book deals and I can’t write a word? You explain that.

I’m honestly looking forward to Phase 4.

 

Phase 4: Hostile takeover.

 

It’s madness out there. I didn’t know that this would get this far. It’s been a while since I’ve made a recording.

I checked my bank account, it’s a series of floating zeroes and ones. I’m a damn trillionaire, but it’s anarchy in the streets. I can’t even leave my mansion unless I take the helipad. And even though I’ve flicked between all six of my apartments on the monitor, it’s like this all over the world.

Mac invited me to his special group of six people, there’s only six of us now, no downlines, no more sales, nothing. An armoured car is going to come to my house and Phase 5 will finally commence, and I damn well hope it fixes all of this. What’s the point of being rich if every shopping centre in America is on fire and being looted?

Turns out that my money only means something if everyone else agrees it is. And now everyone’s just trading in Wonderbars, damn fucking piece of garbage Wonderbars.

I don’t know why but Mac sent the six of us a PDF of his initial business plan. No clue why, maybe he was showing off.

The bars cost less than a cent to produce in the most shittiest backwater country imaginable by slave labour, half the flavours were just the same but under different names, and even though Wondersellers could buy a box for fifty dollars, it only cost Mac about five. The customers weren’t the customers, the Wondersellers were.

I think there’s only Wondersellers out there now, fighting each other. I saw some on the news, but I had to turn it off. The flavours had become gang signs and I just kept wondering… Where were all the Non-Wondersellers? The customers? 

Turns out that Wonderbars were pretty cheap to make because of what they were made out of. And as the brand grew, the demand for it continued. And people were turned out of jobs, out of work, out of lives unless they joined.

It turns out that it was pretty available, more than grain or wheat or oats or anything else that was on the packaging. Honestly, I didn’t know things had gotten this bad. I remember when I was at a seminar once, there was a pretty successful guy who first started at Phase 0 with me who went on a whole tirade about how the food was running out and there was only a few harvests left before he went full tinfoil hat and disappeared into some bunker somewhere.

 

Phase 5: The End of all Things.

 

The truck arrived early in the morning. They did a whole containment tunnel thing, from my front door to the seat of the car. I felt the plastic of the tunnel warp as pleading hands pushed against it. I heard screams, gunfire and, something I’ll always remember, the crackle of a Wonderbar being unwrapped. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination? Honestly, I haven’t slept in days. But that’s the least of my problems given that I’m bleeding out now.

But we’re getting ahead of it, so I’ll start from when I entered Mac’s mansion.

He was sitting on his sofa, and playing with an airplane. A toy airplane. I remember that. There were lines upon lines of cocaine on his desk and several empty liquor bottles. I didn’t get the names. I can kind of make them out from where I’m laying, on the floor, but my vision is getting pretty hazy.

He told me, and the other five, how during the war there were airplanes that came back riddled with bullet holes. And the smart scientists found the places they were shot the most and fortified them.

But there was no change to the casualties. Turns out they should have been fortifying the areas of the planes without bullet holes. Because if a plane was shot in those places, it would never make it home.

Survivorship bias. 

Why you think all old buildings are pretty because only the remaining ones weren’t demolished. 

Why you think all old technology lasts longer because for every miraculous working piece, you don’t see the thousands of garbage units that bricked and will never use them.

Why you see the people on stage talking about how they earned millions, or billions or trillions, and you won’t hear from the single mother who started selling herself on the streets to make rent when the Wonderbars didn’t sell. I mean, it gets better. She kept buying more inventory, got back into debt and started selling her daughter as well. I think her name was Jennifer. Can’t remember. She killed herself. And probably now makes up half a case of Lemon Tart.

Tart. That’s pretty funny. Ironic or coincidental or however you say it. Or is it funny? I don’t know, I’m losing a lot of blood.

Mac told us how he was sorry, and he used that word a lot. He spent thirteen hours a day doing his dumb seminar, and his dumb podcasts and YouTube series and his late night show about how “everything could be fixed” and how “all problems could be solved”.

And here he is, doing bump after bump and swigging vodka back like there’s no tomorrow, because there probably isn’t and the knocking on the door and the shrieking is getting louder.

I didn’t expect him to pull out the revolver. I honestly didn’t. But maybe that’s why there were six of us? I guess that makes sense.

He shot Sven and Sarah, straight in the head. Glen didn’t get a chance to cry out, but Paul definitely did. Jeanette had started to run when he fired and then he shot once more.

And the bastard shot me.

Didn’t glance me, didn’t kill me. Shot me. 

I’m having to hold my goddamn guts in whilst I’m talking, this is ridiculous.

I looked up to Mac and there’s nothing there. All the charm, the persona, the confidence and now somehow he doesn’t even look human.

He left the room after that, and now it’s just means the corpses and the boxes of bodies.

I’m surrounded by the losers, and now it seems like I might be one too.

I can hear them coming,

I can hear their cries in the corridors.

They’re crying out in anger and pain and suffering and sadness.

And they’re coming for me.

I’m going to move towards the box of Wonderbars on the far side of the room.

The Wonderbars will help me.

The Wonderbars always have.

And the Wonderbars will save

[AUDIO STATIC]