When I was an Amway IBO, 30 years ago at this point, I was all "gung ho" because although new, I was excited because I was sponsoring people and my business was growing. I moved up the rankings and crossed the Amway stage as a 1000 pin, 2500 pin and later a 4000 pin. I was considered a "mover and shaker" so I had "earned" the opportunity to spend time with our upline diamond. I got to attend some home board plans and got to "associate" with the diamond. The experience was coveted by many and here I was "living the dream".
But along the way, I noticed some strange things about the Amway business that defied explanation. Sort of a "Bizarro" world, coining a phrase from I believe the Batman comics. So what are these bizarre things I noticed? Well, we always talked about business and how much money diamonds made. So I once casually asked my sponsor how much cash he was making (we were friends prior to Amway) and he told me "none of my business". I thought it was odd when they tell the audience that the upline diamond makes $40,000 a month or something of that nature. Even at functions we were bombarded by talk about residual income, fabulous vacations, financial freedom, etc.
I attended an audience where we were told that "losing money was success". If you were not yet cash positive, but were learning the system and developing your IBO skills, then you are a success even if the cash wasn't there yet because we were in training and this was simply a prelude to untold wealth and financial freedom. Some upline taught "fake it till you make it". Meaning, pretend to be wealthy until you became wealthy. The problem was that nobody I knew of was becoming wealthy, at least not because of Amway. After a while, the Amway business just became sort of a mundane job where were paid to work rather than being financially rewarded for our efforts. But don't forget, it's your own fault if you aren't succeeding, despite following the "foolproof" system that they constantly promoted. Even though I was doing ok as an IBO, I started to see and notice these bizarre events and started to wonder what the end game really was.
Then we got taught about submission to upline. This one was hard to take. So for example, if I was already an established successful businessman but joined Amway and some 22 year old was my upline somewhere, I was supposed to listen to his advice simply because he joined Amway before me even if he maybe hadn't accomplished much in the business itself. Does that make any sense to anyone? And at functions, we were not supposed to "crossline" which is to talk business with other IBOs because we had no financial interest in their business, thus that advice only came from directly upline, which was also odd, because it was common at functions to have crossline diamond speakers, which they told us was ok because it was a diamond speaking. Wouldn't a newbie IBO be able to benefit from speaking to me, a 4000 PV pin?
And there are others, but I recall my sponsor being under the weather and said he had a "warm". I assume he said it because it was the opposite of saying he had a "cold". As if saying something opposite was going to change the facts of what is happening. I could write a dissertation about all of the odd things that go on in the Amway IBO world, but these are a few that stood out to me during my IBO days. Thankfully, I snapped out of my Amway trance fairly quickly and recovered in time to build a nice career and life for myself and my wife. Anway bizarro stories to share? Please leave them in the comments.
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