More a Cafe Society hijack, but for an amusingly dark take on a cult-like MLM from the bottom up there is the single season of On Becoming a God in Central Florida. It’s a little uneven and the cultishness is a little over the top as played, but Kirsten Dunst is pretty good in the lead role as a cynical, tough and desperate housewife trying to work the scam to her advantage. It was initially renewed, but any second season died with the pandemic.
The way it used to work was that Amway would insist you replace all your household products with Amway products. Amway would say you needed to do this to show confidence in the products, in order to sell them to others. In reality, little Amway product was sold other than to new Amway suckers, complying with this requirement.
I remember when I was a kid the father of one of my friends became an Amway distributor and overnight their house became “Amway-ified” with Amway products used for absolutely everything. Even then, while I didn’t understand entirely what was going on, it seemed weird to me. And shortly after that when his father became disillusioned, it became very much like Milo Minderbender and the cotton crop (which will mean something to you if you have read Catch-22).
When the US and other governments cracked down on the scam, the definition (or part of the definition) of whether or not a business was an unlawful pyramid scheme was whether less than a certain percentage of income was from actually selling product. This caused Amway to have to change its business model from one which relied largely on sales of product to new suckers to one in which the primary source of Amway’s income was sales of outrageously expensive cult-like sales materials.
Too bad. I kind of liked the show and the direction it was going.
Food isn’t even half.
Back in the 80s I was backpacking around Asia and I stayed in Singapore for a few days. I happened to meet a very friendly guy who claimed to be from Hawaii, where coincidentally(!) I was going to stop off in the way home. He said I could stay with him instead of going to a hotel.
He had a long story about his wife being Indonesia and he was there for a month waiting for him. He wanted to borrow some money because his wife had wired some to him, and worse case was that he would give me the money in Hawaii.
The reason I knew it was a scam was he claimed to be a restaurant owner. I had worked part time in a restaurant and knew that there was no way you could leave it for a month. In high school I had worked for a year at one restaurant and by the time I quit I was one of the longest employees.
The amazing moment for me was near the end of the article, when he suddenly discovered that encorporation will not protect him from having to pay business taxes like the HST he owed to the government but spent. And that he would personally owe the taxes. I know virtually nothing about running a business, but I did know that.
Dude started a business without knowing the first thing (or a single thing) about running a business.
It was a great show with some evil twisted minds behind the MLM. If you liked Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs, he’s much scarier in OBAGICF (!). In fact, he reminded me a lot of that M*Pillow guy; I’m actually surprised when I first heard about them that it wasn’t a MLM scheme.
No that one is simple. Just shitty overpriced and overhyped pillows sold by an idiotic madman.
When I was a housecleaner, one of my semi-regulars was a family with four kids. One day I showed up and the mom asked if Amway products were any good to use. She’d bought them to pacify a friend or cousin or whoever, and of course, she’d gotten the recruiting pitch.
“You can do it in your spare time!”
“I have four kids. What is this ‘spare time’ you speak of?”
My childhood best friend’s mom got sucked into Amway for a hot minute in the early '90s. I remember her house filling up with Amway stuff. The worst part was having to listen to a tape of an Amway rendition of “Who’s On First?” If their cleaning products are as good as their comedy, they might actually make things dirtier.
Typically the product is bought by your downline as $499 starter pack or buying product to sell at parties, etc.