I think the definitive, devastating critique of Amway was Matt Roth’s “Dreams Incorporated: Living the Delayed Life with Amway,” in The Baffler #10 (paper copy available here, PDF here; the Amway piece starts on page 40).
She can fire bullets out of her pants?
It’s sad but if I ever hear from someone from long ago I will suspect it’s due to Amway or another MLM. Around here they hit on strangers in stores. I knew a guy who got hit on a lot , I think because he was always dressed well. I must not look like their type since they never bother me.
My mother was in Amway for years, and was a distributor. During that time, most of her friends were Amway friends. For instance, when I graduated from high school, I got graduation presents from these people, even though I didn’t really know them (it was a great surprise that I got presents for graduating from high school anyway).
They did not all go to the same church, but going to church seemed to be a prerequisite, and when they had meetings, they started them off with prayers.
And when my mother eased out of the organization after years, her “friends” acted like she was doing something scandalous, and they took it as a personal affront, and most of them never spoke to her again.
I had a boss once, who sold Amway on the side. She was pretty upfront about it, not trying to hide it or anything. She’s no longer my boss, but has gone on to other pursuits and is no longer with Amway. She was/is also an income tax preparer during tax season and probably made more money on this sideline than Amway.
She did say Amway’s products were good, and if they didn’t stress signing everyone up and just went about selling the product they would make plenty of money.
As I said she did income tax so she was aware of all the ins and outs of being in business, using you home for a business, etc. She told me she used to go to the Amway gatherings and take a vacation at the same time charging all her vacation expenses as ‘business expenses’.
She was a very nice woman, very engaging and eventually did go into selling real estate as she was a good sales person.
She never mentioned it’s cult like atmosphere, I found that out later.
I had a friend in college who did this crap, and sucked me and a few other friends into a meeting with the usual ambiguous claims. I’ve never had such a radical shift in perception of an individual than I did when I realized what he had sucked me into. He went from a solid, squared-away, intelligent guy to a dumbshit who believed this type of crap and was willing to sell himself and his friends out for it. I think he was a bit ostracized from there on out. For good reason.
RickJay wrote a fantastically hilarious post on an Amway meeting he attended once. Every so often I drag it out and read it again just for laughs.
What are their products like, anyway? Are they good quality? How do they compare to what you can buy in a typical department store? What are the prices like?
John DiFool
Thank you! and RickJay. That post was one of the best I have ever read on the SDMB.
This is the key. When (here or elsewhere) the common debate about the distinction between a cult and a religion is rehearsed, one of the key points tends to be that the former cut you off from people outside the group and the latter doesn’t. I don’t know that I completely agree, but I think there is a lot of practical truth to it. A perceptive poster (I can’t think who) has suggested that the real reason that the leaders of the Westboro Baptist Church protest funerals is to so outrage the community so that the group members are shunned and alienated and have to remain in the group. Whether Amway’s leaders mean this to occur or it is just a byproduct, if Amway’s methods alienate your friends, you end up cut off from everybody except Amway people and this is cultlike.
I took part in organising a school reunion recently. I was in charge of the emailing list. I carefully preserved everyone’s privacy by sending all reminders, invitations etc using the bcc field so I wasn’t spraying everyone’s email around. Then this one time I accidentally used the To: field :smack:
Sure enough one guy then used my mailing list to contact everyone about some MLM he’s involved in. I sent him a pretty vicious email telling him he was six sorts of asshole and to knock it off and as far as I know he has done so (or maybe he just stopped sending things to me). Need I add that he was the one guy that showed up to the reunion without RSVP’ing, and the one guy that didn’t pay?
Some of the products are actually pretty good.
But, because of the company structure, overpriced. I used them when I could buy them from my Mom, but after that–no way.
But they branched out into having lines of everything, and I don’t think the quality held up, even though the prices were similarly inflated.
We had a relationship with friends nearly deteriorate when the wife in the couple started selling Amway. Once they figured out we weren’t going to buy anything from them, they became very standoffish and bitter for a long while. Luckily, they became a little more normal over the years and now we can hang out with them without getting a pitch. I do remember one particular incident I’ll never understand though regarding their “products”. The wife of the couple was always telling me how we should talk to her if we were ever planning to make a big purchase because she could get credit for herself and get us a better price through Amway.
So, I tried to take her up on that and said, “O.k., I’m planning to buy an Infiniti FX-35, have already sold my old car, so I have no trade-in, and I already have financing through my credit union. The dealership will give it to me for X. If you can beat X through your connections in the next week, I’ll buy the car through you provided you can get me the car in the same color with an equivalent option package”. Then there was lots of hand wringing and requests for more time, and guess what? Yeah, I bought it through the dealer rather than her. And she knew I was looking at the car previously, so it’s not like I sprung this on her suddenly when her magical car connection was out of town. The truth is that she couldn’t beat the price. And somehow I was then the bad guy for “wasting her time”. That’s the part I find very cult like. I’ve had similar experiences with World Financial Group people trying to sell that shitty variable annuity life insurance crap.
-
I have a friend whose gynecologist tried to sell her Amway while she was lying on her back with her feet up in the stirrups on the exam table. She declined.
-
I went to a wedding of two (soon-to-be-ex-) friends who had gotten into Amway. Mr. needscoffee, I and my brother were the only non-Amway guests there. It was held in the home of their next-level-up distributor. It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had. Love, God and Money all in one afternoon. My hand hurt from being vigorously shaken by each and every participant, numerous times. Every person would ask us where our territory was, and we would have to admit that we didn’t sell Amway. Then their eyes would light up. We spent the entire time dodging and weaving. We were afraid if we didn’t leave in a hurry, we might never be heard from again.
The products themselves (at least the actual Amway ones) are pretty good and the company itself isn’t that bad. For example; Artistry, which is their skin care and cosmetics line is one of the top selling brands in the world.
The problem comes from the major branches of the sales organizations, primarily headed by Dexter Yager and Bill Britt. To my knowledge, both are billionaires now. The sales organizations are built on the concept of ‘bring lots of people in and spend a lot of money’. There are lots of meetings, including monthly meetings that you pay for, late night meetings with your ‘upline’, quarterly or semi-annual meetings with higher level speakers that you pay for and annual meetings with 10’s of thousands of people that you pay a bundle for. There are also weekly tapes they want you to buy and monthly books. From what I’ve seen, a huge chunk of the top level people’s income is from simply running the organization.
The meetings always have a quasi religious (or sometimes outright religious) tone, lots of patriotism and rah rah rah. The speeches always follow the same model. 1. This is how our lives sucked before Amway and how we worked to build our business. 2. These are the cool toys and things we do with our money. 3. Review of the basic plan that the organization teaches.
You end up spending most of your time with other Amway people and are constantly indoctrinated in the group mind. They are very willing to help you ‘grow your business’ however you like…as long as you do it their way.
I was in Amway for a couple years as a late teen/early 20 something but never really did anything with it. I did meet some nice people and had a few fun times, such as one of the annual rallies where Barbra Mandrell did a concert. I’m glad I got out though and didn’t destroy any relationships along the way.
I cannot comment on their skin care line, but IME, they do make some pretty good products. My mother and grandmother swore by their household cleaning products. Amway LOC was always in use in our kitchen.
Problem is, of course, that they don’t want to sell you their products–they want to recruit you. I think they’d do well and get a better rep if they only sold their (admittedly good quality) products and laid off the recruiting.
I remember this too - that “Aha! Fresh meat!” look. Scary.
I have been to these amway meetings-everybody wants to sign you up-but nobody seems to be selling anything!
No. As I said, she never made it that high in the Amway hierarchy.
My ex-wife was tricked into inviting around a co-worker and her husband to tell us about a “business opportunity.” Before they started their spiel and several times during it she asked, “is this Amway?” At one point she told the guy, “if this turns out to be Amway I’m going to punch you in the face.”
Of course after much happy talk it turned out to be Amway. She got up and stormed out of the room. Because we used lots of Amway products that I bought from someone at work, I worked out that signing up as a “distributor” would save me money. So I did. Although I never bought in to the MLM aspect, and simply bought what we were already using plus any other bargains I spotted, I read the literature I received. I was surprised to discover that it was verboten to deny that you were associated with Amway if you were asked as a direct question. Guess the Amway guy forgot in the heat of the chase.
I can’t think of any other business except drug dealing where so many people deny what they do.