One of the reasons I started blogging about Amway was to share my personal experiences in Amway and WWDB, and to allow information seekers and prospects to get an insight into what I see as potential problems with the Amway opportunity. In many of my blog articles, you will notice that many of the problems I have identified with the Amway opportunity are more closely ties to a motivational group such as WWDB, BWW, or Network 21. But Amway apparently has allowed these many bad practices to go unchecked, thus they are not completely guiltless in the abuse of downline over the years. Sadly, the result has been financial damage done to many hard-working people who believed and wanted a better life for themselves. The Upline are basically charlatans who exploit those who trust them.
Too often, the Amway opportunity is misrepresented by IBOs. For example, I have heard so many times, that Amway is a franchise opportunity, which is not true. I have also heard so many times that an average Joe can work for 2-5 years and create a willable and residual income that will allow you to not have a job, and possibly to allow you to enjoy untold wealth and luxury. I don't believe this is true for the vast majority of people who were sold on the Amway opportunity. Very very few people make any money from Amway and out of those who do, the profits are also from tools and functions and not exclusively from Amway.The bigger problem is the promotion of motivational tools as being the key to success in Amway. Although technically "optional", most uplines will promote the tools as necessary and that an IBO would be insane to build a business without tools. Thus, many IBOs spend money on tools and sadly, most IBOs never make enough money in Amway to cover the cost of their tools. In fact, over a number of years, I have heard of people losing tens of thousands of dollars (or more) to the tools systems. And once you start participating in the system, the decision to quit can be difficult because of the time and money that an IBO may have already invested. Also, the thought that maybe upline is right and that persistence will pay off. Well, there is no unbiased documentation that persistence and hard work (and applying the system) actually works.
Amway defenders like to point out that all the new platinums and diamonds used the system but FAIL to point out that the rest of the IBO force who may have worked just as hard simply ended up with business losses. Amway defenders also fail to point out that perhaps a larger number of platinums and diamonds may have failed to re-qualify at that level. So much for willable and residual income. By the way, of residual income is a benefit of the Amway business, why can't I find anything from the Amway corporation to confirm this?
I could go on and on, but lastly for now, I think it's a bit shady for diamonds to show off fancy cars or mansions as a way to flaunt their alleged success in Amway. I would prefer the traditional manner of reviewing business tax returns. Showing a copy of a check means nothing because business expenses may have exceeded the amount of the check, leaving an IBO with a net loss. But in the Amway opportunity, it is common practice for IBOs to hide their income or to show a diamond's Mercedes as proof of income. It doesn't add up for me and I would urge information seekers and prospects to scrutinize someone who tries to impress you in this manner.
Those are some of the problems I see with Amway.
Amway might have started out as a simple and legitimate way for someone to earn a little extra money by selling some stuff locally, to his neighbors and friends. It was originally a small-town kind of thing, where distributors were not just sellers of goods, but also friends who came to visit you regularly to have coffee and shoot the breeze. In rural areas this was comparable to those days when a local dairy man came around to sell his fresh milk to housewives, and the poulterer came around to sell fresh eggs every week.
ReplyDeleteThings changed when the "movers and shakers" began to take over. They were the ones who realized that selling products locally to your friends was nothing but a nickel-and-dime racket for local yokels and chumps. They saw at once that recruitment of down-line was the key to getting other people to do the work for you. Soon after this, the more enterprising ones realized that they could in fact become independent of Amway if they set up their own AMO or subsystem (WWDB, BWW, Network 21, LTD, etc.), and sold their own collection of books, tapes, CDs, and other tools for IBOs to "learn about Amway." And then they got the idea for those half-assed "functions," where four times a year IBOs were compelled to shell out big bucks to attend a fantasy-festival. The real money was in the "tools" and the "functions." This is why some defenders of Amway have come to blogs like this and bragged that they haven't dealt in product sales in years. They don't seem to realize that, by saying this, they are confessing that Amway is nothing but a recruitment scheme that benefits the higher-ups.
Amway in Ada, Michigan, says nothing about this change, because they helped it along and were complicit in the development. Why not? As long as the big shots in Ada were getting their money, Ada didn't really care that much about what was going on with down-line IBOs. This is why Amway resists any suggestion that it discipline or oversee what goes on the various AMOs. The AMOs are legally independent, and Amway doesn't want to tangle with them.