The products are merely incidental to recruiting more people to "sell" under you.
How does that conclusion follow from the facts that (a) most people don't recruit anyone and (b) the majority of volume comes from people not recruiting anyone
The only thing that kept the FTC from ruling it illegal was the fact that Amway had a 10 customer rule and a 70% rule.
Partly yes, because (as the FTC said) they deter inventory loading, which is illegal. The FTC's conclusion was that "The Amway system is based on retail sales to consumers"
That remains the case today, something you haven't disputed, you've simply tried to claim one class of consumer isn't a consumer, contrary to the FTC's clear advice.
But, as the statistics and testimonials show, those rules are not really enforced.
Yet statistics and testimonials also show they *are* enforced. I don't get bonuses in the US. Believe me, I wish I did. To get them I need to have registered customers with full contact details, and Amway randomly contacts customers as checks.
And now you don't even need 10 customers, just 50PV. And the 70% rule allows you to count your own purchases as sales volume! It's obvious that the rules exist only for appearances and the reality is very different.
As the FTC said, the 70% rule is about preventing inventory loading. If you use the stuff yourself then that influences inventory loading just as much as onselling.
And you have no idea what motivates the average entry-level IBO.
Yes I do. I've been an entry-level IBO. I've sponsored personally, globally, maybe 40 people. I've shown the business and done followups to many more - and I explictly ask them their motivations. "Diamond" income is virtually
never the answer.
In addition we have the Amway Japan surveys, DSA surveys, and testimonials to the FTC.
You have provided no evidence at all to support your
opinions.
It's a perfectly valid question. You are supporting the model as a valid business opportunity despite the fact that you yourself have not made any money with Amway
That is false, I made money with Amway.
and, in fact, use Amway just to buy a product here or there. So, how can you testify as to the legitimacy of the Amway model?
ROFLMAO! Didn't I just predict that very objection.
But all you are doing is spouting the Amway line about "2-5 years," and similar marketing fluff.
I've never mentioned "2-5 years" once.
You're just making stuff up. Again.
And why do you dismiss the testimonials of people who have had really bad experiences with Amway? Oh, yeah, they didn't work hard enough . . .
I've never done that either.
Making up more stuff.
I'm also noticing, as I read through the many posts in the blogosphere, that many of your arguments are lifted almost verbatim from Amway supporter blogs.
TTAA is my blog, yes. Joecool has already pointed that out. No idea what other blogs you're talking about.
The accusation has been made that most of those bloggers are paid Amway shills who don't have much experience with Amway themselves. . .
Joecool and others continue to make that claim about me, despite it having been explictly denied both by myself and Amway.
Interestingly, nobody questions the motives of Joecool, who actively runs at least 4 blogs and has written several hundred blog posts
this year alone.
As for me, I'm just a regular dude who has seen some bad stuff related to Amway. I've looked at the opportunity several times as my family and friends pitch it to me. As a result of some Amway-related shenanigans that my Aunt got involved with, I got a pretty in-depth look of how the model actually works.
That knowledge of the model has not been in evidence here.
None of them have ever made a dime in profit by "selling" Amway (buying for themselves and recruiting others to do the same), but they sure have spent a lot on BSM and product.
Yet most people spend nothing on BSM, and many people, like myself, have made money.
Like I said, I've lost friends and family relationships because I tell them exactly how I see it.
Interesting. You admit you've lost friends and family relationships not because of Amway, but
because of your behaviour.
So come clean: Are you a shill?
nope
If not, why are you so passionate about the Amway "business opportunity" if you've never actually pursued it as a business?
I have pursued it as a business. I pursued it actively for less than 2 years and made decent money, pretty much exactly what I was told I would for the work I put in. Indeed, that business continues to generate income a decade later with no work being put in to it - something which was actively predicted
against.
When I was active I encountered various claims on the internet that were completely contrary to my experience. That doesn't mean others experiences are false, but it does mean they're not universal. I began researching and discovered while various negative experiences reported on the net were based in real experiences, many of the comments were outright false or at best over-generalized, often by people (like Russell Glasser) who actually had no real knowledge of the model, so I started a pro-Amway blog addressing the myths, misconceptions, and overgeneralizations. For reasons that had nothing to do with Amway I had to stop building my Amway business and when I later divorced I transferred it to my former wife. My pro-Amway blog eventually came down too.
A few years later I was living in Paris for a few months and got sucked in to debating Amway on sites like QuixtarBlog, where I discovered the same myths, misconceptions, and over-generalizations persisted. It became a hobby to research the company and I've collected as much information as I can, from court cases to annual reports, to media articles to website reports etc etc etc. My last and only full-time job before I went into the business world was as a university researcher so I have experience in doing this properly.
Eventually I realised on websites I was repeating myself so I started TTAA so I could just point to a post rather than say it all over again. I also started AmwayWiki as an information repository. I haven't done much with it but others have.
In this discussion you've gone through the whole standard gamut of criticisms against Amway. Some of them (like "legal illegal pyramid") just make no sense, others like your understanding of FTC vs Amway and what makes a pyramid are just wrong. Others, like experiencing people not retailing and Amway not enforcing it, or over-hyped exaggerated income claims, are simple over-generalizations. One thing I discovered in my research, for example, is that virtually every distributor related lawsuit regarding Amway, and pretty much all internet criticism, had its origins/experiences in just one Amway "system" and it's offshoots. All the rest of Amway, which was by far the majority, generated very little complaints or criticism.
As with other areas, people over emphasize the importance of personal experience and fall hard for confirmation bias. It's hard for people to fathom how
big Amway is. Even if you attend a seminar in the US with 40,000 Amway IBOs -
you're experiencing just a minority of active IBOs even just in the US.
"Amway distributor" is not a homogenous description. It covers everything from the person who just joined who is buying stuff cause they want it to cheap, to the multi-millionaire who has been building a global business empire for decades. It covers the backpacker selling water filters door-to-door to restaurants to the professional trainer marketing Nutrilite to his clients. It covers guys running professional, ethical, businesses to folk actively, and even knowingly, trying to scam people.
It really is way way way bigger than you know.
. Nearly everyone in the audience laughed at the speaker's corny jokes and applauded at every "inspirational" thing he said, even though his talk was a very convoluted way of talking about network marketing.
