Your network marketing experiences...or...attack of the pod people

[Antinor01]

@Mangetout

My parents did Amway when it first hit the UK back in the early 80s - they turned into pod people, converted some of their friends and drove away the rest; kept on talking about how nice it would be when they ‘went diamond’ (which never happened, of course). I think they made a modest income from it, for a little while.

I’m still convinced it was a significant contributory factor to their divorce a few years later.

Silly thing is that I actually think some Amway products are quite good; multi-purpose mild detergent ‘LOC’, for example, is something I would still buy - and indeed tried to buy recently when a neighbour popped round with a brochure, but that’s the whole problem - you can’t buy the frickin’ products - you come into contact with a distributor and you will be able to place about two or three orders before they come down heavy with the recruitment deal - wherupon your choice is to become a pod-person, or be ignored thereafter.

That really sucks that they wouldn’t sell to you. It’s been a long time, but I believe there’s a program where you can have a distributor set you up to get the stuff shipped to you directly and never have to go through them.

[Mr.Slant]

@Antinor01

With most of the setups, you earn residual income based on the performance of your downline. However, to maintain your status as a distributor you must generate a certain amount of sales volume yourself.

As I recall, it’s part of the federal law that keeps it from being an illegal pyramid. It’s been a number of years though and I may be remembering that part incorrectly.

I think the policy in question is that 90% of your sales have to be to non-MLM-member clients. Something like that. Thus, I’ll say that Amway NOT being a pyramid scheme is purely a legal fiction achieved via accounting fraud.