Amway: Cancerous or Benign?

I narrowly avoided "the invitation" again the other day. Living in West Michigan, I've received a few of them over the years, and I know what they're about, so I recognised that it was coming and managed to deflect it by explaining that I just don't have time and (lying) don't need the money, and thanking him for thinking of me.

"The invitation" is a sales pitch, to become an Amway distributor. Because Amway is based here, we probably have one of the highest distributors-per-capita ratios on the planet. That's reason enough right there for someone around here to hesitate before adding oneself to the crowded marketplace for soap and other household products. But there are more universal reasons to steer clear of Amway.

At its heart, Amway is a pyramid scheme. It doesn't violate the various federal regulations, which prohibit scams in which there is no real product or service being sold, but that doesn't mean it isn't a pyramid scheme; it just means it's a legal pyramid scheme.

Contrary to what you might think from looking at some of Amway's "double diamond" distributors, no one ever got rich selling Amway products. The only way to get rich with Amway is to sell distributorships. You sign up a few of your friends to be distributors, and you get a percentage of the profits for every item they sell... including a percentage of the profits from any distributors they sign up. That's how Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel became billionaires: by taking a percentage of the profits from every person who ever became an Amway distributor. It's really, really good to be at the top of the pyramid.

Despite living in the heart of Amway's operations, I've never received a sales pitch from an Amway distributor to buy Amway products. Just to become a distributor. OK, that's not quite true. I have been asked to become a customer... my own customer. I was told that I could offset my losses (the cost of starting up an Amway distributorship) with the money I'd save buying household products from myself at wholesale prices. This is clearly a standard sales tactic.

Of course Amway does sell actual products. But its flagship product line isn't their legendary biodegradable soap or any other items for the home. Its for businesses... for Amway distributorships, to be specific. Amway is quite honest about the fact that to make a lot of money, you need to be motivated to sell sell sell. (That's their explanation for the countless unprofitable distributorships: they blame it on individual laziness.) Which is why they have an entire division of the company devoted to motivational materials, seminars, and so forth.

The seminars - especially the big ones - are a lot like evangelical revivals for the religion of Mercantilism. They trot out people who became highly "successful", to tell their stories, preaching to the needy and faithful about how they made a lot of money selling Amway (the business model, not the products), and pumping them up to do the same. Of course the kind of people who need someone to tell them how to do this are the ones who'll never be able to pull it off. They just aren't the kind of extroverted Type-A glad-handing salescritters that do well at that. Instead they're the "fallen" of Mercantilism, and they need regular preaching to stay on the road to riches. Fortunately Amway has plenty of that to sell them.

Of course most Amway distributors understand that the key to making money is to have lots of other people selling for you, which is why they work so hard on those invitations to join the Amway clan. And that's my main objection to Amway on principle.

The whole company is based on the idea of turning personal relationships into commercial ones. They want to destroy the traditional family of parents, children, and siblings, and replace it with the Mercantile family of distributors, customers, and clients. They want to supplant friendship with distributorship. Neighborhoods with business networks. The founders and executives call themselves Christians, but there is nothing genuinely Christian about them. They're devout Mercantilists.

You can see this clearly even from the founders early lives. Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel were best friends in school. So what did they do together? They formed businesses. Not "I've always been interested in ____, so let's turn that into a job" businesses, but seemingly random "I think we can make money from this" businesses: a flight school, a drive-in restaurant, a vitamin sales network, and finally a company to sell soap to their friends and neighbors. They were true believers since their youth.

Of course they've also done a lot to promote certain "Christian" principles, with VanAndel funding an institute dedicated to finding evidence to support the foregone conclusion that the world was created in seven days by God, and DeVos single-handedly prevented local Grand Valley State University from offering benefits to partners of homosexuals by threatening to withdraw millions in funding for their downtown campus. And they've both bankrolled political campaigns to advance the agendas of right-wing religious organisations. All stuff inspired by the books of Genesis and Leviticus, not by the gospels.

But they've channeled more of their cash and time into promoting their core faith... building up the downtown Grand Rapids business district, serving on the Chamber of Commerce, etc. And Amway itself has been relentless in its missionary work in the third world, spreading the gospel of Mercantilism to China especially.

Of course not all of the effects of this have been negative. Downtown Grand Rapids is a better place because of their investments. I'm sure good things are coming from the VanAndel Medical Institute, and the DeVos Center Women & Children Center at a local hospital (both of which came about after the founders started suffering from major health problems, requiring DeVos to buy an overseas heart transplant, and VanAndel to watch his wife suffer from Alzheimer's while experiencing Parkinson's himself). Their ongoing support for the arts, education, etc. - even with the strings attached - did a lot of good. But at what cost? They didn't create this wealth of theirs out of thin air; they got it from other people. And who's to say what good the people they got it from might have done? (Even simple things like feeding their families, or making their mortgage payments.)

The name "Amway" is short for "American Way", and their headquarters is built around a shrine to "Free Enterprise". Maybe that's what America is about, but I'd like to think that it aspires to something more ethical and morally defensible than the Mercantile gospel according to Rich and Jay.

Like maybe even the teachings of Jesus.

For example.