My other Amway experience occured in a poster shop of one of the local malls. I was there minding my business when this clean cut fairly well dressed guy about my age came up and made some little friendly remark. I don’t recall just what he said except that I think it was something like, “Are you happy with your life?” or something like that. And the next thing I know, we’re both walking out of the store and he’s telling me that I could work for a great company blah blah blah.
So we sat down at a table and he’s just as pleasant as can be, and I’m thinking how my ship has never come in and maybe, just maybe, this guy holds the key to my loving destiny. Well, seeing that he had me sucked in pretty good, he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a pen and paper and writes something on it, a word.
Smiling with so much love and warmth, and with a heathy tinge of desperation, he asks me (while turning the paper over), have you ever heard of this company? I look at it and – yes, of course! – it said “Amway”!!
I was too broken in my spirit to get mad at him; I just said something civil and got up and walked away while thinking “They’re all nuts.”
I had a brief stint with Amway. Back in March of 1995 a longtime friend of mine showed up one evening along with two guys in suits. At first I thought they were Mormon missionaries (he was a Mormon at the time but has since abandoned the church). They gave me the usual spiel-- glossy brochures and promises of untold riches, living your dreams, working your own schedule and on your own terms, etc. At the time I wasn’t really satisfied with my employment and wanted to earn more than the meager $6-something an hour I was pulling in retail, so I was an easy catch. I bought some of the starter supplies. I watched a couple videos and had some other materials to help get me motivated and comfortable with the program.
I figured I knew enough people to contact to help establish my downline. As others have said, a good way to alienate friends is to try shilling them into Amway. Several former co-workers from my last job were probably left with a poor impression of me. I know I wasn’t aggressive or pushy enough, and I just could not be enough of an asshole to keep harrassing these people and convincing them to join. After about a week or so of this I was ready to give up. The two upline guys then had me attend a meeting/seminar that was held at one of the mid-level hotels downtown. I don’t remember all they said or did, but I was quite uncomfortable. It seemed like a big religious-type function, bordering on being cult-like. After this experience I didn’t want to be involved in any part of this organization at all, so I broke ties with these guys and told them to never call me or show up at my door again. If they had persisted I was ready to contact the police, but fortunately they didn’t.
As for my friend, he didn’t stick with it too much longer, either. I would have hated to see him get roped into Amway since he couldn’t really afford it, either.
I just wanted to say, this is brilliant. Thanks for the laugh.
And now, my experience with Amway. I believe my parents were involved when I was young, but probably only as soap-sellers, not the obnoxious MLM stuff. So I vaguely knew of it, but hadn’t had any experience, really.
Then a couple we’d been casual friends with invited us to “dinner.” You know the drill from there. Sadly, we didn’t have the balls at the time to just not participate, but we had toughened enough that signing up was never a danger.
As to the Christian thing, I have heard that evangelical Christianity has become very much tied up with Amway. But I think they have more in common, and Ethical Culture teachings have given me the vocabulary to articulate the problem I’ve always had with both proselytizers and everything from Amway to Mary Kay to Pampered Chef. In sum, these organizations are all about treating people as means, not ends. That’s why it’s so insulting to be hit up. By pitching you, people demonstrate that you are just a tool to be used for their financial benefit, not a friend, co-worker, or simply a human being with feelings and a right to dignity.
Oh, and as for the Ponzi scheme question: as pointed out, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. You’re think of a Pyramid Scheme, which is certainly illegal, and certainly bears a huge resemblance to Amway. My understanding is that Amway has engineered its business model to be one iota to the legal side of the boundary demarcating what is a “Pyramid Scheme” under the law. Namely, they ostensibly sell products, rather than relying on the old chain letter model, where all income results from new recruits. Of course, we all know that the real income still results from new [del]suckers[/del] recruits, as demonstrated by the folks here who couldn’t manage to buy products from the “distributors.”
Mr. Woodhouse and I once had a guy aproach us at Walmart. He started chatting us up like he was a long lost friend. I didn’t know him; dh didn’t know him, but Scum managed worm his way into a meeting at our house. He came with his wife and they tried to sell us. I knew what they were up to before they even showed, but Mr. Woodhouse wanted to give them a chance.
“Is this Amway?” I asked.
“ooh no!” Says Mrs. Scum.
“It’s Quixar!” Says Scum.
another several minutes of spiel followed by the revelation that Quixar is, in fact, Amway. We didn’t allow the “meeting” to go on much longer.
I always found it so smarmy that he would try and worm his way into our home by pretending to know us. It gave me the creeps.
Our resolve was also helped by the fact that we had already be duped by the copycat company Melaluca. I wasn’t going to be robed twice.
The problem with the “Corporation” of Amway is that they let the distributors get away with all their shady practices anyway. Why? Because it means more money for the company. As long as the distributors are making money for them, they will continue to look the other way and let them continue to fleece everyone.
This was due to a rule they had called a “10 customer rule”. This rule states that a distributor must have at least 10 retail customers in order to receive a bonus check from Amway. This rule is ignored by many groups as the upline stresses the movement of tools (books, tapes, and rallys) over the movement of products. In 1997, this rule was changed: to receive a bonus check, distributors must achieve 50PV (Point Value) each month. The number of customers is now irrelevant.
What gets me is that, if you fail as an Amway person, it’s everyone else’s fault for not supporting you. It’s like saying to everyone, ‘Don’t you want me to be rich?’ I was willing to do this, why can’t you? So people who turn them down aren’t just turning them down, they are bad people who are disrespecting the Amway person’s choice and wants them to be poor.
Reminds me of chronic gamblers: 'they’ll all be sorry when I finally hit the jackpot!" They see support of their desire to have money as the key factor in a friendship without realizing it. The friendship, to use an overused phrase once again, is all about them.
Barring those from years ago who actually wanted to just sell the products and didn’t expect untold wealth, you have to have a poor sense of cause and effect these days to get into it in the first place, so it isn’t surprising if such people can’t forsee the consequences.
(By the way, the ads for me had one MLM ‘opportunity’ and one entitled ‘MLM sucks’ and then Make 3k in your home! No selling! Hmmmm, I can think of one occupation that might qualify…maybe it was the mention of sucking…that’s right, I was thinking Wetnurse.)
I was a distributor too in the early 90’s. Probably would have stuck with it if it weren’t for the divorce…
I actually liked it. I only ordered stuff I could actually use (or sell) and my upline were guys my age and I got along with them really well.
Seems like some of the posters in this thread had some shitty upline people.
Our group used the 6-4-2 circle method of describing how to go direct, that is, you sign up 6 people, they each sign up 4 and they in turn sign up 2 each. What’s that, about 58 people? And then each person you signed up was only responsible for buying stuff for themselves. No outside selling, just spread the word. Seemed all up and up and on the table.
I think the formula was to spend about $200/month on stuff you buy anyway, like paper products, personal care stuff, foods, kitchen/bath supplies, etc. Not a real stretch there. The stretch was getting the other 58 people to do the same thing.
It was suggested that if you went direct in this manner that you’d be able to do this full time and quit your job since you’d eventually have other directs below you and reach a comfortable level of sales directed through you.
I think it was an overall positive experience for me, meeting new people and challenging myself to try something different.
I haven’t been approached since I left and I have no idea what the current situation(s) are in that business or if I’d ever get into it again or have a decent upline if I did.
The real problem is that as one of the original 6, you are at the top of the pyramid. That works well for you because you get returns on the money spent by the other people on the lower levels. If you spend a bit extra on the $200 of products, no big deal because you get it back. The problem is for the folks lower on the pyramid. Those last 2 people for example are spending more for those every day products with the expectation that they will see a return, but they don’t. This is why pyramid schemes are unethical and generally illegal, except apparently when they are called “MLM”.
That’s just too funny. I’m picturing a couple invited to a party who want to make a good impression on their new friends and arrive with the white board thinking “Everyone likes pictionary. It’ll be a great way to break the ice with new friends.”
Before they can even explain their intentions they are told to leave immediately and are shown the door and told to never come back.
“Wow. I guess these people really have something against pictionary.”
I’ve only had two encounters with Amway and they were both quite negative.
Back in the early 80s, one of my Dad’s friends came back from America enthusing about Amway and recruited my parents, who leapt at it with enormous viguour - they recruited many of their friends and rapidly ascended a fair way up the ladder, but the new set of tensions that this introduced to a previously established and balanced network of friends eventually ripped the heart out of it. I’m pretty sure that Amway, or rather, the obsessive zealous fervour to ‘go diamond’ that it inevitably inspired, was a significant contributor to my parents’ marriage breakdown.
Then about five years ago, some neighbours called round with a brochure - because of the change of face the company has undergone, I didn’t immediately recognise it as Amway, but I eventually twigged and I did buy a few of the products I remembered to be good. But of course I wasn’t allowed to just be a customer - within a couple of weeks they wanted to do a presentation, at which I had to endure a couple of hours of hard persuasion.
I resisted, because despite all the claims that you can do it in your spare time, I knew that wasn’t realistic and anyway, the idea of it all still squicked me out a fair bit.
They lost interest in selling me the products (despite that I still wanted them) - they wouldn’t meet my eyes when we passed in the street. Eventually, their marriage collapsed quite violently (I can’t say how much of this will have been caused by Amway, but I have my suspicions) and they moved away.
So even though I still think some of their products are worth using, I won’t buy them again now, because I just don’t want to appear even remotely interested in being recruited.
The products are just a superficial vehicle to get people recruited into the structure, which is so much bullshit, intimidation, psychological pressure and vain promise.
That’s it in a nutshell - on the face of it, it might sound appealing to be told “wouldn’t it be good if you could take advantage of your existing great network of friends, family and workmates to make an income, but with everybody involved benefiting?”
Trouble is that not everybody does benefit, and ‘take advantage’ isn’t such a great thing when you’re the one being taken advantage of, so one by one, your friends, family and workmates come to realise that you’ve turned into an exploting, manipulative asshole, Only when they’re all gone does that realisation come home.
When I was in college, and about 5 years afterwards, it was as if there was a huge sign on my forehead saying, “Amway Sucker Right Here”. I couldn’t go 5 months without someone trying to make a pitch to me. They approached me at work, through organizations I belonged to, and even approached my spouse. We always turned them down.
The worst one was one guy who worked at the same company I did, but was in a different department. Long story short, we became good acquaintances at work. One day he called me at home which surprised me as I didn’t think he had my home number. He wanted to meet me and my wife for lunch. He was going to be in the area. I said yes and set up the time and place. I had a bad feeling about it, but we met up anyways with him and his wife. Nothing was brought up about Amway at all, but little did I know that he was just fishing for info on us. The next week, he asked me out to lunch at work, then he made his pitch. I politely refused. Afterwards, he never once talked to me again. It was too bad because he really seemed like a nice guy, but it was all a ruse to get me to join.
My parents had a very good friend in college who ended up flying fighters in Vietnam after graduation, so my parents lost touch with him. After several years with no contact, he called them out of the blue, said that he was out of the Air Force and had purchased a small plane, and invited them to take a spin in it. They very happily accepted, and met him at a small airport that weekend. My parents reminisced about old times, which he participated in only until the plane was at cruising altitude, at which point he went into his Amway pitch. My parents looked around for parachutes, but, finding none, were completely at his mercy. To this day I can get that vein on my dad’s forehead to stand out just by mentioning Amway.
Well, the circles, that’s just for illustration. Everyone down stream from you was also supposed to get their 6 people signed up and so-on and so-forth. It just made it easier to show how easy it could be to go direct. The 6-4-2 was the simplest route to direct, but in essence everyone was supposed to do it.
And therein lies the problem inherent in all pyramid and MLM schemes. If everyone signs up the number of people they are supposed to, by the time you get 5 or 6 levels deep, there are no more people left to sign up.
Ah, that’s why only the motivated ones get rewarded. Fundamentaly, I understand what you are saying, you can’t have everyone succeed, but that’s the way it is in any endeavor.
Not everyone can own Microsoft either.