He was at his college orientation. He was looking at a map. This girl came up to him and asked him if he needed help. She helped him. She hit him up about this organization. He looked at it today- said it "smelled funny".. which is pretty good for a kid out of high school.
I am just trying to figure out the angle more than anything else. Their tag line is..
"Growing your dream exponentially!
one vision, one mission, one message, one method"
Plus on Linked, the co-owner of the business is listed. She has this late night infomercail guy as one of her websites-
Advise him to run away as fast as his legs can carry him.
No offense to anyone here who has had a good experience with Amway, but I've heard some horror stories from people I know, and the internet is filled with a lot of other stories. Just google 'Amway sucks'.
Amway use to get peeps to sell their products, cleaning crap etc and then recruit others. It was like a huge pyramid scheme. Heard about it first in the late 70's early 80's, not sure if they are still out there though.
Mystery shopper jobs are another craptacular way to lose money. No personal experience here but a friend of mine was almost sucked into that.
I am pretty proud of my son. His "spidey sense" went off like no ones business. Good kid.
Amyway has been around since dinosaurs walked the earth. Like most multilevel marketing schemes they get you to sell their crap by getting your friends to buy it and sell it. You get a hit off of your friends selling it, and their friends- and so on and so on...
In the end, no one makes all that much money- the only people who make anything are the people making the stuff- The Christian angle is even more disturbing.
Anyway- I guess they are branching out into power drinks as well.
"If I buy $200 of stuff from Amway this month, I'll get a 3% bonus check (3% of $200 = $6). If I share the opportunity with nine others, and we each buy $200 of stuff from Amway this month, they each were responsible for $200 and will get $6, but I'm responsible for $2000, moving me to the 12% level. I get $240. However, I'm responsible for paying the bonuses of the people right below me - $54 - so I keep $186. I make more because I did more, I found nine people who wanted to buy at a discount and get a bonus for doing it. After I reach the 25% bonus level there are other bonuses that kick in, but they're all based on the volume of product flow, not on signing people up or having lots of people...."
About 15 years ago I lost a friend to Amway. They're a cult that happens to sell cleaning products on the side. He got sucked into the "lifestyle" and it changed his entire demeanor. He went from a happy go luck guy who laughed all the time, to a mantra quoting guru wanna be. We used to work together and by the end I requested to work different hours, just so I didn't have to deal with him.
Anyone remember Lifespring from the 1980s? Tony Robbins type stuff but much higher in psychological peer-pressure. Some friends of mine got mixed up in the most recent incarnation of it, called Accelerate Trainingshttp://www.acceleratetrainings.com/) and tried some very high pressure tactics to get me in too. I went to one of their "Friend Meetings" and it smelled fishy to me. Still don't entirely trust my friends after that (long story not for this thread).
Tell you kid to hold his ground if he sees the girl again, and stand firm. Then avoid her at all costs.
eta: Scratch most of that. More research done. LTD=Quixtar=Amway. But the last part still stands. Hold your ground then avoid.
Why must you be the screen door on my submarine?
This message has been edited by CashierGirl on Jul 10, 2009 3:05 AM
Isn't Mary Kay kinda like Amway, in the selling, bonus, get other poeple to sell is schhhtuff?
We bought our house from a dude and his wife. The wife was a Mary Kay salesperson. She used on of the bedrooms for product storage and home sales!! Mary Kay EVERYWHERE!!!!! Gah.
Anyway....she must have been pretty successful at it....she had a PINK Cadillac.
From my research on Amway/ Quixtar/ Amway Global:
(at the company's websitehttp://www.alticor.com/)
Alticor is a corporation in Michigan. They owned the Amway business of door to door sales in the 60's 70's and 80's. In the 90's they started Quixtar as an online distribution taking the hand to hand out of it and added additional product lines. As recently as last year they have merged all their subsidiary companies under the same name "Amway Global." This includes all their smaller enterprises such as the "Amway Global Orlando Magic" who play in the "Amway Global" arena.
My opinion here that as with any business opportunity it is what you make it. There are mentorship or leadership teams that you can become a part of that are separate from Alticor/ Amway. My opinion again... this is where all the crap you read when you Google "Amway Sucks" comes from, the processes of the mentorship teams. Amway/Quixtar seem to have a pretty good reputation through the better business bureau. http://www.bbb.org/western-michigan/business-reviews/multi-level-selling/quixtar-in-ada-mi-11002927)
Sad to hear about everyone's friend's experiences, though. And as for the Mary Kay lady, my sister sold Mary Kay for a time. She had closets full of the stuff. She told me regularly that I should consider it.
...who used to hang around on the fringes of our group. He had long red hair, wore a tri-delt sorority tshirt just to piss those girls off (scored it at Goodwill) and was just generally a good old fashioned ner-do-well. He dated a girl with a pierced nose. In 1992. In East Texas. He was one of us. (by us I mean my peers).
The second year we were there he was curiously absent. Then one day I spotted him. Hair closely cropped, khaki pants, blue blazer, white shirt, tie. He tried to sell me on Amway right away. It was like invasion of the body snatchers. He had become a pod person. He had even joined the Young Republicans.
I do not trust any organization that has the power to so fundamentally change a person.
Nothing wrong with being clean-cut and wholesome. It was just the indredible transformation.
I have never understood how this works in practice... Not the mechanics of the pyramid, but the allure to anyone.
Who wants friends that try to sell them stuff? It just goes to the core of fucking up that relationship to me. It'd be one thing if I had a buddy that loved to knit or make wood furniture or something, and I said, "Hey, I need a new turtleneck and a hall table - wanna do it for me? I'll pay ya!"
If I was out with said friend and they started in on - "Hey, you know all that regular stuff you get from Target? Well you can buy it from ME instead and save big! And if you sell your other pals and your family on it you could actually MAKE MONEY too! YOU CAN'T LOSE!!"
I'd say - "Check please."
Aren't your friends on of the last remaining outlets in life that DOESN'T market you relentlessly? Seems like an incredible violation such that it shouldn't work at all to me. Go figure on some human brains I guess.
Some of you might remember I used to sell Tupperware.
As a seller, I got 25-30% of my sales. If I recruited other consultants, I got maybe 3% of their sales as well.
I think I knew where to draw the line between Tupperlife and real life. Of course, I asked a few friends to have parties to get me started, and if they were able to - great. If not, that was cool, too.
My mom used to sell Avon. She didn't go door to door or anything like in Edward Scissorhands. She had some friends and stuff maybe. I dunno. I used to like the big, Avon boxes they would ship stuff in. I would have my sister climb in when she was real little and then push her at mach 1 around the house. Jump off ledges and stuff. Sorry for the digression...
Amway Tampons WOULD be a great name for a punk band...lol
I think that like any organization- Church, etc. People get really, really, really into what they are selling. I know guys who live, eat and breath what they sell- I have always found a way to turn it off- but it can be hard.
What I don't get is the commission structure is pretty obviously one sided- unless you are making a decent percentage for high dollars, it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Yeah, I see a big difference from Avon and Tupperware than from Amway.
I'm not even really sure what Amway sells to be honest - but my sense is that Tupperware and Avon try to market their stuff as "You can only get this from this channel." So going to a Tupperware party is to have access to something you normally wouldn't. I also never got the sense that the sales pitch was anywhere near as hard-sell.
That's cool Amber that you were that good a saleswoman. If only we'd pay you as much to teach as you could probably make selling cell phones or aluminum siding!
After I get my Specialist Degree (should be finished in December), I've thought about selling Southern Living at Home. They have pretty (but sometimes expensive) stuff. I think they get 50% of their sales, and they don't have minimums that must be sold in order to stay active - the reason I left Tupperware.
This message has been edited by Amber633 on Jul 10, 2009 11:20 PM
I've been to a bunch of parties over the years where the idea behind it is to buy stuff and maybe host a party of your own.
I've gone to lingerie parties, candle, Tupperware, Aloette (makeup) and crystal parties. I don't mind going to the parties and picking stuff that I want, I just don't want to host parties, even if it means extra savings on stuff.
We had a jewelery party here- I served margaritas and the women got really, really drunk. It was fun.
We also have been to the Pampered Chef party, where you buy stuff for the kitchen. I never end up using any of it. The last thing I bought was a terracotta baking pan- which I didn't really buy, but they screwed up my order and I ended up with it anyway (cause I think it was going to cost the sales person money if I didn't take it).
I suppose the Pure Romance stuff is the same marketing scheme. Weird to have a sales quota on the number vibrators you can sell...
