One of the apparently common practices among major IBO groups is still the concept of "buy from yourself". I believe IBO leaders teach this because most people are not familiar or not comfortable selling goods and services. Therefore, to teach buy from yourself makes the business an easier sell. In reality, an Amway IBO is simply a commissioned salesperson with no benefits. But presenting the opportunity that way is unlikely to yield results either, thus the buy from yourself has become a common practice. It sounds like something that most people can do, rather than emphasizing the need to sell to people you don't know.
Buying from youself makes you a customer and not a business owner. Buying from yourself doesn't generate your business a profit. Would you open a car dealership to buy a car? Now I am not suggesting that supporting your own business is a bad idea. What I am suggesting is if you are the primary or exclusive customer of your Amway business, then you aren't really running a business. You are simply a glorified customer. I believe some or many IBOs fall into this category because they are simply unable to move products to non IBOs.
What an IBO is really doing is paying his upline's bonuses. Amway overcharges more than 30% of the cost of their product. They have to do this in order to be able to pay IBO bonuses. Since most IBOs are at 100 PV or less, the lion's share of the bonuses earned are channeled upline when a purchase is made. It is not a level playing field as some IBO leaders might suggest. Also, some of your uplines who don't even know you might benefit from your efforts. Now that's residual income right?
What compounds the situation and makes it worse is when an IBO pays for standing order or attends functions where some of these IBO leaders may teach this bad business practice. You as an IBO already pverpay for products for which upline gets most of the bonus, but then the problem is made worse by IBOs paying to receive this bad advice. When I was an IBO, I heard speakers talk about skipping rent or mortgage payments to attend more functions, or having your family skip a meal so you can buy standing orders. Buying from yourself is just another example of bad advice given from upline to downline. What makes it worse is that some uplines profit by giving bad advice.
Are you buying from yourself almost exclusively? Can you think of any truly successful business where the owner is the main or possibly the only customer? I can't think
3 comments:
You can't "buy from yourself." The entire idea is illogical and violates the basic principle of non-contradiction. It's like "killing a dead person," or "teaching a stone." Dead persons don't have life, so they can't be killed; and stones are incapable of learning, so they can't be taught.
"To buy" means to exchange value for something that you do not yet own. The thing that you are buying has to be in the legal possession of some other party. If you already "own" the thing, you can't "buy" it. This is elementary logic, and if Amway IBOs can't understand it then they are really stupid.
Amway apologists try to finesse this point by saying "You are buying from your own store," but that is also absurd. First of all, Amway isn't an IBO's store. It's the store of the Van Andel and DeVos families up in Ada, Michigan. They're the ones who own Amway. An IBO is just another customer buying Amway products. Second, even if it were an IBO's own store, he couldn't "buy" from it in any meaningful sense of the word. If I own a hardware store, and I take home one of my screwdrivers because I happen to need it, I don't put money into the cash register! The screwdriver is mine. I don't have to "buy" it!
If an Amway IBO really owned the Amway store, he wouldn't have to pay anything to get products. If it were "his store" he'd just take them.
Amway only appeals to persons who have no grasp of elementary logic, and who are unperceptive about the abuse of language.
Let's see if some stupid Amway asshole shows up here to argue against this.
Excellent comment!
The Amway equivalent of encouraging people to eat their own limbs to avoid starvation.
It defies logic.
Post a Comment