A Bad Idea?

 One of my thoughts when I finally left the Amway business was that it was actually a bad idea to begin with. I joined because a good friend of mine had joined and had reached (at the time) the level of direct distributor. I didn't know exactly what a direct distributor was but I knew that it was a fairly high and significant level. My friend told me that it was a lot easier than he thought and that he could easily teach me the secrets of how to do the same thing he did. I started to think that perhaps I could also do the business and hopefully make a few extra dollars, which seemed desirable as I was still young and fairly new to the full-time workforce.

So, I eventually joined, and I had pretty quick success, being able to sponsor some of my good friends and the excitement of the growing business made it seem as if everything was going just the way my friend mapped it out. That I would show the plans and people would join, and my business would grow. And on the surface, it looked like I couldn't miss.

But as a few months passed by, I started to see cracks in my upline's teaching, although I didn't pass my "negative" thought to my downline. I saw the upline tell us to get out of debt, which was good advice. But then they would say it was okay to go in debt, but only to purchase Amway products or Amway training as it was an investment in our business. That began to raise red flags. Later, in a "movers and shakers" meeting, I heard some teaching about how you could miss 3 mortgage payments and not have your home foreclosed in case you needed cash to attend the next big function. I was starting to wonder if our leaders were interested in our success or just squeezing money out of downline.

Later on, in a smaller but intimate meeting, as Amway leader taught that we could even have our families skip a meal in order to buy another standing order because it might contain the one thing you need to hear to propel your business to diamond. When I heard this, I really started to question upline's credibility. The end finally came for when my upline told me to dump my fiancee because I could focus on my business better without her. That was the last straw and I left the business. Being that I was taught well, I never complained about it and just forgot about it.

Then I saw a magazine article exposing the tools scam. I eventually began researching about Amway and shortly later, Joecool's blog was born. I had concluded based on my research and personal experience that Amway was a bad idea and a scam.