Sometimes it happens to the nicest of people and it oftens happens slowly and subtly. These are the signs that you are becoming indocrinated and you are likely annoying your loved ones at this point. While the IBO is under the Amway trance, they probably believe in what they are doing or saying, not realizing that they have become irrational in their zeal to promote Amway.
*You're driven to recruit everyone you know. You may even resort to deception or outright lies to get people to meetings. You may read a script prepared for you by your upline or you may be repeating something you heard on a cd. Before you know it, your family and friends avoid you like the plague.
*You're encouraged to develop an unreasonable, irrational zeal for the products. Even so far as to justify the quality of toilet paper or to call the products prestigious or premium. You may even argue the quality of energy drinks or about phytonutrients, something you may not even know about. You will use canned answers that have been supplied to you by upline or something you heard at a seminar.
*A whole bunch of demands, promises, subtle threats of failure if you don't try hard enough are made in the promotional material and motivational seminars. i.e. If you quit, you are a loser destined to die broke and unhappy. As if Amway is the only way someone can earn extra money or to be successful.
*Because the system is touted as the way you're going to make yourself fantastically rich, you're under pressure to drop any conflicting or competing interests such as your bowling league or golf club. Nothing else in life has importance except for the quest of financial freedom. All activities in your life must enhance your Amway business and have an affect on your financial future. Anything that affects your Amway business must be dropped or you are doomed for failure.
*Your upline soon becomes your most trusted friend. Your thoughts and feelings are shaped in part by the cds, meetings and functions. You end up shunning lifelong friends and/or relatives just because they are not "fired up" about Amway and thus must be avoided.
Do you recognize these behaviors? Hopefully you aren't displaying these behaviors.
Here are a few more signs:
ReplyDelete1) You develop a strange state of mental exaltation, where you start to have a glazed look in your eyes as you say "This thing is going to take off and become REALLY BIG!"
2) You begin using weird language like "empower" and "prosumer" and "entrepreneurial mindset" and "leveraging technologies in a 21st-century business opportunity." And when someone asks you what these terms mean, you just repeat them again and again, like a mantra.
3) You make up dismissive acronyms for things that you hate, and you use them in place of rational thought (a job is "Just Over Broke", and being concerned with anything other than Amway is fixation on status, or "Still Too Arrogant To Understand Success").
4) You talk about buying from "your own store," even though the place is just a warehouse from which you order overpriced products that you don't really need, and can't sell.
5) You refuse to read or listen to anything that criticizes Amway in the slightest degree, because you are terrified of anything "negative," or of being influenced by "stinking thinking."
All of these signs are part of the Amway Syndrome -- a serious mental disorder that will cost you both your peace of mind, and your money.
A good rational assessment! Most people snap out of it fast but some bite hard and spend years chasing the Amway dream that never comes true.
DeleteIt costs you time chasing a dream that will never materialize, you just lose your youthful days.
DeleteThe time is more important. You can earn more money. You cannot get back the time wasted on the business.
DeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteNice post. I wanted to point out one of the 4 points you brought to the discussion.
You said, "*You're encouraged to develop an unreasonable, irrational zeal for the products. Even so far as to justify the quality of toilet paper or to call the products prestigious or premium. You may even argue the quality of energy drinks or about phytonutrients, something you may not even know about. You will use canned answers that have been supplied to you by upline or something you heard at a seminar."
I was discussing the issue with the pricing of Amway products, and he mentioned that Amway is priced competitively. I then went through a price break down of how XS energy drinks are 400% more expensive than monsters (This involved a lot of basic math, but ultimately XS was about 29 cents an ounce whereas Monster was about 8 cents an ounce). He then replied, it wasn't a good comparison because XS has more vitamin B12 in it. To which I replied, yeah cause when I think about energy drinks my first concern is how much B12 is in it...this was such a stupid ploy which I dissected into 3 major points. Are the people drinking XS in danger of B12 deficiency? is Monster not supplying enough B12? How about the fact that Monster has less than half the amount of caffeine as XS? I justified the points saying that very few people in the Country let alone the world is deficient in B12 because we get it in our diet from animal products (i.e. eggs, milk, and meat), and that Monster supplies "100% of the daily need for B12" whereas XS supplies 4900%. This is concerning because last I checked 100% meant you were meeting your requirement. 4900% of anything tends to be bad, even exercise, but luckily there is no downside for using excess B12. Needless to say he never responded back because his logic was awful and his canned Amway answer got owned.
Who wants to pay $35 for a can of xs drink when Starbucks costs $5?
DeleteGood post Mike. Yeah, I had that discussion with Amway IBOs too and one finally responded that XS tasted better, which is a valid point, but it's also subjective and there are still a lot more sales of monster drink than XS.
DeleteI had one IBO go so far as to say glister toothpaste was a better value than other toothpaste because the hole in the tube was smaller, thus you used less. I literally fell on the ground laughing.
You trust a "friend" who demands submission from you and leaves you when you fail? What a joke.
ReplyDeleteTrue, the Amway upline will say friends for life but what they mean is friends for life if you keep buying tools from them.
DeleteHere's the key to it all. When I told my cousin back in 1971 that it was extremely difficult to sell Amway products, because of their high price, their ordinary generic quality, and the complications of ordering them, here's what he answered, verbatim:
ReplyDelete"I find that the best way to sell Amway products is to sell The Plan."
That's when I realized that the whole thing was a goddamned elaborate SCAM. My cousin was ADMITTING that the products were overpriced. He was ADMITTING that they basically sucked. He was ADMITTING that ordering them was a pain in the ass.
But in his eyes none of this mattered. The essential thing about Amway, for him, was The Plan.
Those guys who argued with Bronstein and Joe Cool were just trying to come up with semi-plausible excuses for the lousy Amway products. At least my cousin was being honest.
The products are just a façade to hide the recruiting and pyramid scam. The products are not competitive and priced too high to be purchased by the average consumer. Only starry eyed IBOs will even consider purchasing these products, but only when they have the "dream" of early retirement and residual income.
DeleteOnce IBOs quit, somehow the desire for those high quality Amway products goes away.
There is a great simplified version of this story called the $100 pen pyramid http://www.mlmmyth.org/the-100-pen-pyramid-scheme/. While I recommend reading the couple of paragraphs here is an even shorter summation of the story. Someone starts with a bunch of pens they make and charge $100 each. They don't sell. They then reach out to people and say if you buy 10 of my pens I will give you part of your money back. If you get others to also buy 10 pens I will give you part of what they spend plus what you spend. After a bunch of people join, they run out of steam and the last group that joined can't get anyone below them and lose thousands of dollars. Needless to say nobody really wanted to spend 1,000's of dollars on pens but they bought them because they could make money off of teaching others to buy the pens.
DeleteThis is still a pyramid, there is a product, and this is not a sustainable business model. This story, similar to Amway's story, reveals that it is not about the product, but rather forming a line of recruitment below you, and not be stuck as the last one holding the pens.
Good analogy. The only reason Amway and other MLMs are still going is because new people turn 18 and become adults each day. If not, the model would completely saturate and collapse.
DeleteThe agreement is one-sided.
ReplyDeleteUpline teaches downline accountability but uplines don't have that. They lack accountability and act defensively when their flaws are seen in the light.
You're right. Upline takes credit if and when someone succeeds but failure is the IBO's fault. Eve those who put forth tremendous effort will be told they didn't do things "just right".
DeleteAt least people from cross lines can blame other uplines when an individual fails in Amway. They would say, you probably didn't have a good sponsor and that's why you didn't understand how to succeed in the business...I got told this 20x right after I stopped goofing around at their FED. I never heard an upline take responsibility for their own downline. They are pros at passing the blame and edifying themselves.
ReplyDeleteSadly, the brainwashed downline don't see it. That uplines want the adulation for any good that comes but any bad is passed downline. I still see many IBOs who comment that it was their own fault for failure or that they didn't work hard enough.
DeleteThe upline has never been held accountable.
It's more than just up-line needing to be held accountable. The ENTIRE AMWAY PLAN is the problem!
ReplyDeleteI'm prepared to admit that there could be honest, ethical, and helpful up-line people who do their level best to aid and encourage their down-line IBOs. Not everyone involved in Amway is personally evil. But that doesn't justify the Amway system itself, which is rotten to the core. There were kind and humane slave owners, but slavery is still a bad institution.
Right. The plan and the system of Amway is flawed and designed for a few to succeed and for most to make nothing or lose. Look at the 6-4-2 plan. It's 79 IBOs with one platinum. The rest lose money if they are dedicated to the cds and functions.
DeleteJust the fact that you are discouraged from "crosslining" is enough of a reason to see the scam....if where all in the same business with the same goals and wanting the same outcome why would I not associate with others in said "business"?More sketchy behaviour!
ReplyDeleteYes, in normal business conventions, you are able to freely talk to others and exchange ideas. In Amway ou are breaking the upline rules. In reality they don't want IBOs to discover that they are all losing money on the system. They want that on the down low.
DeleteIt's a very typical cult tactic. Don't let your members compare notes on what is happening. They just might find out something that you don't want them to find out.
ReplyDeleteThat's why some people call Amway a cult.
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