What the hell is Amway?

Never heard of it until a recent meeting which made me suspicious. What is it?

It's multi-level marketing, which at its best is one step from a Ponzi scheme, and at its worst actually one.

A famous pyramid/ponzi scam.

I hear the products aren't half-bad, but they push it worse than some street-level drug pushers.

They actually sold stuff?

Apparently Amway itself is legal — just barely and due to a lot of lobbying — but there are also schemes among its ranks that most certainly are pyramids, most of which are based on ways of working the legal Amway chain.

The cause of more problems in our society than you can possibly imagine?

They not only actually sold stuff, as he said, but most of them (the cleaning products at least) were pretty good. The problem was that you didn't make nearly as much money actually selling the stuff, as you made by recruiting other people to sell the stuff, and collecting a commission on their sales.

I knew several people that signed up with it simply to get the employee price on the stuff they wanted to buy for themselves. They'd sell some to friends, if you asked, but they didn't work at selling it.

That bad, huh?

I have seen several set ups like this around Omaha. One for a online store network, one for supplement line, amco, and the knives one.

I only heard about this from MST 3 K, the episode with the "cuteosaurus" that burst through the door whilst Mike shouts "Amway!"

I had no idea these things still existed.

Why is it still legal though? (Other than lobbying...)

And why do people still join it? I don't understand at all...

^ People like Amway are legal because they have something to sell and their business model is reliant upon recruiting middlemen rather than directly selling their merch. The stuff Amway sells does sell so people are willing to work with it since their products are known to sell.

Otherwise neither their business model nor legality is solid.

All I know is that they have strange commercials that don't actually tell you what they're selling, and a guy that we used to listen to on the radio is their spokesperson...

Yeah, they're vague about it because of their bad reputation (among people who've even heard of them) and the fact that there's no way they're going to beat Procter and Gamble or Sun Products at their own game.

They really don't like P&G; in fact, it's been said that the "P&G's logo is SATANIC OMFG" controversy from The '80s was started by Amway distributors as a smear campaign. (It also happened to be around the height of the Satanic ritual abuse and backmasking controversies, so it got a lot of coverage. The Washington Post even did a relatively long story on it.)

edited 17th Aug '11 7:28:35 AM by lee4hmz