My sister and brother-in-law are still into Melaleuca, but I don’t think they do more than buy the products anymore. They tried to get me to join, but I declined. The two of them have always been into this type of thing. These companies really push the conservative Christian, family-based theme a lot…which is kind of funny, now that my brother-in-law has decided that maybe he’s gay…but he still “believes” in Melaleuca!
About 15 years ago, I had an acquaintance hound me repeatedly until I agreed to listen to his Primerica pitch (along with his trainer). My “friend” and I were both Naval officers, and the trainer was a former officer.
I got sucked in for about 6 months before I came to my senses.
Overall, they spent far more time pushing the “dream” than talking about their services. Definite cult-like atmosphere. I even got talked into attending a convention, which was like a revival meeting.
Back in the 1980s, my stepfather got into Amway. It took us years to use up all of the crap that he bought–because he sure never sold any.
The answer to your question is actually in your question.
This is the crux of the answer to the actual question posed by the OP. The definition of a cult as opposed to a religion is that the former tries to cut you off from the rest of society outside the cult. MLM’s are cult like because they do this. They want to alienate you from and innoculate you against sensible people who will wake you up to the fact that they are a scam. They want to dehumanise your friends in your eyes so that you will be prepared to treat them as marks and not friends.
No. The product is typically nothing special but expensive, and what you are paid is necessarily limited by the insane overheads that a multilayered upline necessitates.
What products does Amway sell?
I’m not trying to pick a fight over this, but the man who gave me the multi-hour pitch to form a “downstream” Amway distributorship was and remains staggeringly intelligent and replete with common sense. His wife is a director of a major communications company and he’s the most gifted electrical and software engineer I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something, believe me. Ironically, his greatest skills were in the area of failure analysis!
I can only assume he had this mind-boggling blind spot when it came to Amway.
As you know, Amway’s apostles are taught to defer mentioning the “A” name as long as possible, but I knew right away what he was pitching because I grew up in the home city of Amway, Grand Rapids / Ada Michigan. Their indoctrinators had over-saturated the area like the proverbial “burned over district” (and isn’t that an appropriate metaphor). The son of one of the founders – Dick DeVos – left Amway and ran for Governor a couple of years ago (and lost big time, fortunately! No one in Michigan trusts Amway…)
He kept telling me how much money I could make as a distributor from those who would be “downstream” once I coerc… er, *convinced *others into forming their own distributorship (Amway’s jargon is straight out of the Newspeak Dictionary), but I kept asking him, over and over, “So who’s gonna actually sell the products?” And he kept replying “Don’t worry about that. Focus on getting others to form distributorships instead.” (Pyramid scheme, anyone?)
Naturally, I didn’t take him up on his offer, but it hurt a lot to turn him down. He was a great friend and I owed him, but converting to Amwayism was simply not something I could live with.
BTW: Some years back, the Attorney General of Wisconsin launched an investigation into Amway and discovered that only 14% (IIRC) ever even broke even and only a much smaller percentage actually made any profit.
What don’t they (try to) sell! Hell, they even sell cars and boats.
But their prices are ludicrous. I’d guesstimate there’s a 40% markup over traditional retail on most items!
One last observation: Amway had been running a lot of ads during Countdown and the Rachel Maddow show. What the hell were they thinking??
Last I heard, just about everything for the home. The Wiki article says “Its product lines include home care products, personal care products, jewelry, electronics, Nutrilite dietary supplements, water purifiers, air purifiers, insurance and cosmetics.” I’ve always heard that the laundry detergent, or something like that, is good but not worth getting involved with the company just to buy it.
There are exceptions to everything. And smart people will sometimes turn their brains off at the promise of free riches - you’ll sometimes hear of lawyers, doctors and the like caught up by Nigerian email scams.
I’m another one that went to a Primerica presentation! I was looking for a job at the time and they had an ad in the paper that looked like an ordinary job ad, so I applied (that was over a decade ago so I don’t remember details of the ad, only that it looked like an interesting job on paper). Needless to say, that was my first and last exposure to Primerica.
I had someone offer me a job - no interview - at Primerica. He wanted me to get my friends and family to re-fi.
I declined.
I was out of work and received a call after placing my resume on Monster.com. The guy made it sound like an office job, which is one area I was looking at. I got there and saw all these people there for the “interview” too, and watched their PowerPoint presentation. You had to sign up on the way out, and out of desperation I wrote down that I would like to work as office support only (I figured it was better than nothing). My husband had been so thrilled that I had an interview, I had to choke back tears in the car on the way home. I couldn’t believe that it had come to this, me showing up at a MLM recruitment. Fortunately I got a real interview only a week or so later, but that was a serious low.
The only thing they’ve ever tried to sell me were unrealistic hopes and dreams.
I think getting the vague offer of a “fantastic business opportunity” from distant friends or relatives is a right of passage into adult-hood, like leasing your first apartment, or voting for the first time.
I attended an Amway presentation many years ago. I was pretty annoyed when I discovered what it was, since I had to miss a movie on TV that I wanted to see (this was before home VCRs). There was a certain amount of pressure, which never works for me (I long ago decided that, the harder someone tries to sell you something, the crappier the product). But it wasn’t as bad as others had described.
After they finished their spiel, I told them it sounded too much like a pyramid scheme and I wasn’t interested. They just let me go – probably smart enough to realize that if I hung around, I’d probably take others with me.
I’ve had several friends in the past get into Amway and ultimately it has always ended in the friendship ending as they just could not leave Amway out of any social get togethers. Always trying to recruit.
My favorite though was with a long-time girlfriend’s uncle and aunt. They got into Amway and gave us the standard “We want to talk to you about a great business opportunity” intro pitch. We both knew what it meant, they were going to pitch Amway. Since they were “family” we humored them and got together and heard their pitch. We politely declined and assumed we’d just enjoy the rest of the night over dinner, etc. Nope, they kept the pressure up until we had to be much more forceful that we were not interested.
Flash forward a couple weeks and her uncle needed some help moving a couch or some such thing. I agreed to help him out and we spent a few hours getting a truck, picking up the couch, moving it into their new apartment, etc. The whole time he kept up with his pitch… how he couldn’t understand how I wouldn’t want to make millions? Why am I bothering with college, as I’d never ever make as much money as he is offering me right now?!? On and on it went until I finally snapped and told him I was not interested, would never be interested, and if he brought it up once again it would be the last time we spoke. He responded that if that is how I feel, I can feel free being a loser the rest of my life working for peanuts. Never talked to him again until…
Fast forward several years, no longer dating the same girl, and I run into him out one day. I made all of the small polite chit-chat… So how is your wife? Kids doing good? Where are you living now? Oh, same place? Still working at XYZ corp?
<wicked smug grin> Really? I figured by now you’d have retired early, living in a mansion, and sending the kids off to boarding school in Europe with all the millions you’d have surely made by now in Amway!! </wicked smug grin>
End of conversation as I walked away feeling very, very satisfied over the look on his face.
MeanJoe
What I have never understood is why do people buy products from Amway that they can easily get (probably for cheaper) at Wal-Mart or the grocery store? And how do they sell the products… go door to door? Or just hit up family and friends? And do they just stop at selling the products to someone or do they try to get them to join also?
I’m another person who got suckered into a fake job interview, though I have no idea what company it was actually for. I was desperate for a job (seems to be a running theme in these stories) and I went to interview at this “marketing” company even though I noticed they would post twenty or thirty jobs on Monster.com with wildly (and implausibly) varying job titles. I thought I was interviewing for an office job. During the interview, the guy never came out and said what I’d be doing, only a bunch of doubletalk about doing promotions for Disney and the NBA and that he was grooming me for management because I had graduated from college unlike most of their employees. He then invited me to come back the next day for a full-day interview. I thought this was strange, but I had nothing to do the next day (as I was unemployed) so I agreed to come back and see what I’d be doing. I was instructed to wear my best suit.
The next day, I show up in my best damn suit, and wait outside while the 30 or so 20-somethings (also in their Sunday best) have a pep-rally meeting to get excited about the day. I’m assigned to a group of two other guys, and they say to me, “Let’s see what we’ll be selling today.” I honestly had no idea that we’d be selling stuff. It turned out we were selling crappy “art sets” with colored pencils, oil paints, and stuff in them for $15. We got in one of the guy’s car and drove an hour (!) to Fairfield County in Connecticut and started selling these crappy-ass art sets door-to-door at local businesses! I was like, “people actually do this?” The scariest part was that the two guys I was with sold out of all their product (they call it “blowing out”) because people actually buy crap. I was honestly astounded. Obviously, once I got back to the office (where my car was) I attempted to back out graciously. The guy I interviewed with looked at me with disgust. I really wish I had told him off for deceptive everything practices, but he was a true believer.
I wish someone would crack down on deceptive job postings, as entertaining as my day was.
Wow. So they got a free day of work out of you, by calling it a job interview.
My kayaking friends and I had to put our friendship with one of the members of our group temporarly on hold because he and his wife joined Amway and became fanatics with the Amway sales techniques.
They returned to normalacy and to us after a couple of years when he and his wife went bankrupt.