I'll be out of town for about a week. I'm going to Seattle this weekend to attend a certain football game. All at my own expense, no Amway residual income. LOL. I'll be back posting early next week.
In the meantime, I have this blog post called "Is Amway A Scam"?
The short answer is no. Amway the company is not considered a scam. However, IBOs powered by Amway and/or leaders from groups connected to Amway such as WWDB, BWW, or Network 21 can end up scamming people by using the Amway opportunity as a front. They'll promote Amway as a way to earn a lifestyle of the rich and famous. They may promote Amway as a means to earn lifelong financial security. The catch will always be that you need to follow their system. The system has been referred to as a scam by many over the years as it is often the reason why
The system normally consists of cds, voicemail, standing orders, books, functions and seminars. Some of this technology is outdated, but likely has not changed in many years because uplines profit from the sale of these "tools". It's basically a bait and switch. They lure you in with the hopes and dreams of a fabulous life and uncountable amounts of cash rolling in. They then sell you the secrets of gaining these trappings. Sadly, only a tiny fraction of 1% will ever see any kind of significant success. And out of those who do enjoy some significant success, many of these people find out that Amway success may not be sustainable.
The truly horrifying result of all this is that probably 99% or more people who have dreams of a better life and financial security will actually end up with a net loss of money and time that they could have used more productively. In my IBO days, I saw some crossline lose their homes or enter bankruptcy following the advice of their trusted upline mentors. It almost always had something to do with skipping out on financial obligations in order to buy more tools or to attend a major function. The secrets of a diamond lifestyle is apparently to sell standing orders, functions, voicemail, but not necessarily selling Amway products, at least for the higher ups.
If you look at the earnings of platinums and diamonds, you will easily see that those kinds of incomes cannot sustain million dollar lifestyles, especially when you factor in business expenses such as traveling (first class?) and hotel stays. If diamonds fly first class everywhere they go, that's a lot of cash to run their businesses.
So, is Amway a scam? No, Amway the company is not a scam, but Amway IBOs and Amway IBO leaders who run functions can certainly scam you. Beware!
2 comments:
OK, so the Amway company itself is not a scam. They just make products.
But Amway lives off the scams that are run by the various AMO subsystems. Amway products simply cannot compete with big-name brands easily available in brick-and-mortar stores. So the Amway racket was conceived as a complex way of creating a network of person-to-person sales, where relations between seller and buyer were friendly, local, and face-to-face.
It worked in small towns and isolated communities where people liked the personal touch. Like Avon, Tupperware, Fuller Brush and other concerns that ran a door-to-door sales operation, or gave neighborhood parties, this was a viable business model in some parts of the country. And Avon, Tupperware, and Fuller Brush actually offered items that people wanted.
But Amway's MLM structure was vulnerable to the parasitical and corrupt AMO subsystems (WWDB, BWW, Network 21, Leadership Team, and many others) that turned the entire thing into a pyramid scheme of endless recruitment and compulsory training via "tools" and "functions," with very little emphasis on sales to the general public.
The subsystems are basically uninterested in selling things. All they want is to recruit deep downlines of IBOs who will send money every month to those above them in the pyramid. As far as the Amway Corporation is concerned, as long as the AMOs encourage their members to purchase a fixed amount of Amway products every month, everything is fine.
So Amway is culpably complicit in the rip-off of low level IBOs, because it does nothing at all to police the AMO subsystems or correct their abuses. It's like those medieval bishops who leased out their rental properties to madams and pimps who ran prostitution rings, but who claimed to have no knowledge of what was going on in the places where their rents were collected.
Spot on comments!
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