9 ms·

Going Diamond: on Amway

61 points by samclemens 10y ago

SteveWatson 10y ago
Huge pop-up after reading for three seconds!
dceddia 10y ago
I didn't get the popup (probably because of uBlock)... But this quote stuck out: Nothing was wrong with our life before Amway – we didn’t join it to fill a void. We were happy, until we were told we could be happier.
ohyoutravel 10y ago
This is a pretty interesting long form article. Reminds me of a Franzen book or something along those lines, maybe an episode of This American Life. No popup for me by the way. uBlock Origin might be behind that.
richardlblair 10y ago
When I was 16 I fell into the Amyway trap. What the author is documenting is accurate. It's a trap. I never really regretted it because there were so many other bad things I could be getting into at 16. Especially where I lived. It also instilled some values that I still hold today. Not to mention that at 16 I had access to wealthy people who taught me how to manage my money. So yea, Amyway is a trap - but a lot of people are happy in that trap. I think the most disappointing thing for me was when I realized that the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences. Edit: Typing is hard
- chowraid 10y ago
  The same happened to me at 17 and keept it going till I was 19. I really didn't buy that many Amway products, but I did enjoy reading the monthly self help books they sent, many of those books were really helpful.
  - pc86 10y ago
    I was active for about 18 months, and probably would have stayed longer if I had a single sales bone in my body. I mostly enjoyed listening to the stories of those above me (I never made more than $400-500/mo so that was most people who weren't losing money) but of course I paid for those CDs so in the end I made much less money than it looked like I did on paper. I do like the concept of being positive, visualizing your future, making a plan to reach it, etc. It's a shame it's so closely ingrained with a company selling dish soap and disgusting energy drinks, though!
    - richardlblair 10y ago
      HEY MAN DONT TALK SHIT ABOUT THIS ENERGY DRINKS!!! Fuck, maybe I should stop drinking those? :P
      - pc86 10y ago
        I like energy drinks but my god XS tastes like garbage.
  - richardlblair 10y ago
    Seriously - as a teenager with way too many hormones doing all sorts of crazy shit to your brain, it was nice being around people that were so grounded. The books added to that. The perspective I had at 16 can only be attributed to "the system" they talk about in the article.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  "I realized that the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences." I always think it would be nice if people were able to be valued by the value they add, rather than what they can extract for themselves from the system. Not sure how that would work in practice, but it would basically fix capitalism if it was possible, since preying on suckers often seems the easier and faster route to wealth and power.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  > the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences. I've noticed the same about many of the super successful "entrepreneurs" who frequent places like /r/Entrepreneurship, various entrepreneurship blogs, and even sometimes here on HN. They get rich off of selling books, classes, access to "forums" [sic], and from referrals to their fellow "entrepreneurs", and not from any other entrepreneurial activity that they've done previously.
  - pc86 10y ago
    It's the same as the reason why people like Pat Flynn make 25x more from affiliate fees than from any of their actual businesses. There are a lot more people who want to "make money" than there are people who want to "start and grow a business." PF makes money selling tools that help people make money online (doing anything - read some of his article on "article spinning" and how he defends it and it will make you want to vomit). Darren Rowse makes money selling tools that help people make money blogging. Even Nathan Barry (who I'm a big fan of) made a lot more money from Authority than he ever did from his design books. ConvertKit was just a shift from product to service. Along the same vein, a lot of people in Amway want to "make money" and not very many want to "start and grow an MLM business." Selling $40 CDs and lecturing your down-line about buying non-Alticor products is just the best way to do it.
    - jaredhansen 10y ago
      >There are a lot more people who want to "make money" than there are people who want to "start and grow a business." Exactly right. Cf "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights."
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - heartbreak 10y ago
    I see exactly this from sites like unicornfree.com. And I don't mean that as a slight against @amyhoy. Occasionally I get a similar vibe from @patio11, but I still respect his incredibly good insights. These are people who are very involved in the startup community and contribute a whole lot more value than most people. They just like to sell knowledge as well as give it away.
figjamjam 10y ago
I was excommunicated from my family at 15 because I refused to join Amway. It's a family destroying dangerous cult. It's not like my family was super awesome before Amway but it did drive us from lower middle class to poor while promising them riches. It made me very wary of any get rich scheme - including tech start ups. Instead I'm getting rich slowly. Which is fine for me but really bad for dating. The whole living frugally and saving is a very hard sell, especially in SF.
- bsenftner 10y ago
  You are doing it right. Any potential life partner that does not have the "patience" and good judgement to see the wisdom of your choices is not worth spending time with anyway.
  - figjamjam 10y ago
    Thanks. A problem occurs when the market gets too thin. I've had all my long term gfs leave me for much older richer men. As a guy I'm confident that I will both get older and richer so I'll be fine. My greater concern is for the opposite effect on women and the gender dynamics in general.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      In SF I see a lot of 20-something women with 40-50 year old (rich) men. This was a bit surprising when I first came here. In no other cities I have seen this happening at such a large extent.
      - tdb7893 10y ago
        That's part of why I'm not sure I want to move to SF. I'm from somewhere that is barely considered the suburbs of Chicago and my girlfriend is from a small farm in Iowa and I'm worried we wouldn't fit in. People spending lots of money kinda makes me uncomfortable.
        10y ago
girishso 10y ago
Reminds me of the book: Merchants of Deception https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439247153/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480609001&sr=1-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=Eric+Scheibeler&dpPl=1&dpID=51WGe7jbJ2L&ref=plSrch https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439247153/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=...
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  excellent read. found it after a neighbor had started floating the idea of me joining his 'business'. had been hit by amway folks before, but I dug in a bit more and found MoD. This all happened in PA, and I'd read it while I was living in PA, so it seemed to feel a bit more 'real' (no idea why though).
creeble 10y ago
I grew up in Grand Rapids, two miles from Amway HQ. Working at the Amway factory (yes, there is [or was] a factory) was my first job after (dropping out of) college. A friend was the HQ tour guide for all the Silvers on their way to becoming Diamonds. He was hilarious. It is an interesting cult. Never quite figured out the attraction; you're either the kind of person who likes / falls for MLM schemes or you aren't I think.
- micah_chatt 10y ago
  No way! I grew up literally across the river and could see Amway from my bedroom window.
pastProlog 10y ago
Trump is appointing the daughter-in-law of Amway's founder to run the Department of Education. No surprise, she sees it as a money-making (charter school) opportunity for corporations.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  I don't see why she necessarily has to be a bad person just because who her father-in-law is.
  - pc86 10y ago
    You misunderstand; she's a bad person because Trump likes her. /s
- tomcam 10y ago
  I am the grandson of a bootlegger and the son of alcoholics. Doesn't make a me a bootlegger or an alcoholic. The fathers of both President Clinton and President Obama were despicable men; this does not make those Presidents despicable men.
aswanson 10y ago
I am continually stunned at the amount of people, even some whom I'd consider rational enough to see through this pyramid scheme nonsense, approach me with it. Amway, Quixtar, Karatbars, Herbalife...the Ponzi scheme with a Thousand Faces.
- pc86 10y ago
  Quixtar is just the US/Canada distributor of Amway. They're literally the same company. Also Amway isn't a pyramid scheme. It's stupid and an incredibly risky way to try to make money, but it simply doesn't fit the legal definition of a pyramid scheme. It's pretty easy to dismiss Amway for a whole host of reasons, no reason to do it based on one of the few claims that isn't legitimate.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    No it's definitely a pyramid scheme, just carefully structured to avoid that legal definition for pretty obvious reasons.
    - unsignedint 10y ago
      I believe a narrow definition of pyramid scheme is if the payment is made solely for signing someone up under you. If the payment is made through commissions of sales rather than the merely based on new participants sigining up, ai don't think it's legally a pyramid scheme, more of an multi-level marketing scheme, though personally a practice I wouldn't sign up regardless...
      - jbooth 10y ago
        Except the products are 100% overpriced knockoff junk. They're only there, as GP said, to make it just barely not a pyramid scheme in the eyes of the law. Nobody joins Amway because they believe in the products, they join because they believe in the pyramid concept.
        10y ago
NelsonMinar 10y ago
Betsy DeVos, the incoming Education Secretary for the US, is the daughter-in-law of one of the Amway founders. http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/11/23/trump-picks-betsy-devos-daughter-in-law-of-billionaire-amway-cofounder-for-education-secretary/#57495cff5313 http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/11/23/trump-pi...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tomcam 10y ago
  And what is the value of this information?
  - gech 10y ago
    Because it should be evident that there's no way in hell we should be putting someone like her with a background like that into office.
losteverything 10y ago
Decades ago my can't-say-no-mother had this Amway guy at the house. He sold us matches that could strike even under water. It was very valuable to know about Amway at such an early age. Years later the salesman was out of Amway. He apologized to our family. He said he would have sold Amway to president Nixon.
mrbill 10y ago
I did a lot of computer consulting/fix-it work in high school (late 80s/early 90s), and one of my biggest clients was a guy who was the region's "Diamond" / biggest Amway distributor. The first time I showed up at his house, I was surprised to see that he had a two-car garage converted into a pretty nice home office / mini-warehouse. Couple of desks with their computers and printers set up, lots of shelves to store tapes, videos, soap, and other products to be sold.. with a double glass door leading to his indoor pool. We had an agreement: he wouldn't try to sell me or my family anything, and I would fix his computers as needed for money. It worked out well. A few months after I'd started fixing things for him, I got suckered into going to a presentation by a friend (classmate). I'm sitting there on the front row, and the promised Big Important Speaker walks up.. and it's my client. He sees me in the front row. "Bill ,what are you doing here!?" "Hey Robert. A friend asked me to come.." It was rather funny seeing all the people oooh and ahhh over THE AMWAY DIAMOND SELLER and I was just, "Hey, while I'm here.. need anything fixed next week?"
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stillmbarrassed 10y ago
Amway ruined my childhood. My parents became involved with “the business” in the late ’70s or early ’80s. One of my first memories is of a first grade classmate sharing the news that his parents had “gone direct”. Even at that young age I was aware that this was something my parents had wanted to achieve for a long time, and I wondered why they couldn't - what was wrong with them? Throughout elementary school I came to understand that Amway was for losers. It was not uncommon at that time for Amway to be the punchline or subject of other mockery. So by the time I reached adolescence I had a full-fledged paranoia that friends or classmates would find out. At sleepovers and camping trips I'd have to hide my Glister toothpaste. When friends visited I'd be afraid they'd spot our L.O.C. dish soap. But the worst was when my parents decided to “draw circles” for my friends’ parents. I think this only happened a couple of times - I'm pretty sure I even asked my parents not to do it. My parents are good people, perhaps very naive. I think they are still involved with Amway to this day. I’m sure they never made any money from it, and I shudder to think how much it has cost them. Since I left home for college I don't think we've ever discussed it. I doubt they know how much I resented it.

61 points by samclemens 10y ago

Huge pop-up after reading for three seconds!

I didn't get the popup (probably because of uBlock)... But this quote stuck out: Nothing was wrong with our life before Amway – we didn’t join it to fill a void. We were happy, until we were told we could be happier.

ohyoutravel 10y ago

This is a pretty interesting long form article. Reminds me of a Franzen book or something along those lines, maybe an episode of This American Life. No popup for me by the way. uBlock Origin might be behind that.

richardlblair 10y ago

When I was 16 I fell into the Amyway trap. What the author is documenting is accurate. It's a trap. I never really regretted it because there were so many other bad things I could be getting into at 16. Especially where I lived. It also instilled some values that I still hold today. Not to mention that at 16 I had access to wealthy people who taught me how to manage my money. So yea, Amyway is a trap - but a lot of people are happy in that trap. I think the most disappointing thing for me was when I realized that the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences. Edit: Typing is hard

chowraid 10y ago
The same happened to me at 17 and keept it going till I was 19. I really didn't buy that many Amway products, but I did enjoy reading the monthly self help books they sent, many of those books were really helpful.
- pc86 10y ago
  I was active for about 18 months, and probably would have stayed longer if I had a single sales bone in my body. I mostly enjoyed listening to the stories of those above me (I never made more than $400-500/mo so that was most people who weren't losing money) but of course I paid for those CDs so in the end I made much less money than it looked like I did on paper. I do like the concept of being positive, visualizing your future, making a plan to reach it, etc. It's a shame it's so closely ingrained with a company selling dish soap and disgusting energy drinks, though!
  - richardlblair 10y ago
    HEY MAN DONT TALK SHIT ABOUT THIS ENERGY DRINKS!!! Fuck, maybe I should stop drinking those? :P
    - pc86 10y ago
      I like energy drinks but my god XS tastes like garbage.
- richardlblair 10y ago
  Seriously - as a teenager with way too many hormones doing all sorts of crazy shit to your brain, it was nice being around people that were so grounded. The books added to that. The perspective I had at 16 can only be attributed to "the system" they talk about in the article.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
"I realized that the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences." I always think it would be nice if people were able to be valued by the value they add, rather than what they can extract for themselves from the system. Not sure how that would work in practice, but it would basically fix capitalism if it was possible, since preying on suckers often seems the easier and faster route to wealth and power.
jnbiche 10y ago
> the guys at the top aren't getting rich from Amyway, they were getting rich from everyone buying tapes, books, and going to these conferences. I've noticed the same about many of the super successful "entrepreneurs" who frequent places like /r/Entrepreneurship, various entrepreneurship blogs, and even sometimes here on HN. They get rich off of selling books, classes, access to "forums" [sic], and from referrals to their fellow "entrepreneurs", and not from any other entrepreneurial activity that they've done previously.
- pc86 10y ago
  It's the same as the reason why people like Pat Flynn make 25x more from affiliate fees than from any of their actual businesses. There are a lot more people who want to "make money" than there are people who want to "start and grow a business." PF makes money selling tools that help people make money online (doing anything - read some of his article on "article spinning" and how he defends it and it will make you want to vomit). Darren Rowse makes money selling tools that help people make money blogging. Even Nathan Barry (who I'm a big fan of) made a lot more money from Authority than he ever did from his design books. ConvertKit was just a shift from product to service. Along the same vein, a lot of people in Amway want to "make money" and not very many want to "start and grow an MLM business." Selling $40 CDs and lecturing your down-line about buying non-Alticor products is just the best way to do it.
  - jaredhansen 10y ago
    >There are a lot more people who want to "make money" than there are people who want to "start and grow a business." Exactly right. Cf "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights."
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- heartbreak 10y ago
  I see exactly this from sites like unicornfree.com. And I don't mean that as a slight against @amyhoy. Occasionally I get a similar vibe from @patio11, but I still respect his incredibly good insights. These are people who are very involved in the startup community and contribute a whole lot more value than most people. They just like to sell knowledge as well as give it away.

figjamjam 10y ago

I was excommunicated from my family at 15 because I refused to join Amway. It's a family destroying dangerous cult. It's not like my family was super awesome before Amway but it did drive us from lower middle class to poor while promising them riches. It made me very wary of any get rich scheme - including tech start ups. Instead I'm getting rich slowly. Which is fine for me but really bad for dating. The whole living frugally and saving is a very hard sell, especially in SF.

bsenftner 10y ago
You are doing it right. Any potential life partner that does not have the "patience" and good judgement to see the wisdom of your choices is not worth spending time with anyway.
- figjamjam 10y ago
  Thanks. A problem occurs when the market gets too thin. I've had all my long term gfs leave me for much older richer men. As a guy I'm confident that I will both get older and richer so I'll be fine. My greater concern is for the opposite effect on women and the gender dynamics in general.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    In SF I see a lot of 20-something women with 40-50 year old (rich) men. This was a bit surprising when I first came here. In no other cities I have seen this happening at such a large extent.
    - tdb7893 10y ago
      That's part of why I'm not sure I want to move to SF. I'm from somewhere that is barely considered the suburbs of Chicago and my girlfriend is from a small farm in Iowa and I'm worried we wouldn't fit in. People spending lots of money kinda makes me uncomfortable.
      - 10y ago

girishso 10y ago

Reminds me of the book: Merchants of Deception https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439247153/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480609001&sr=1-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=Eric+Scheibeler&dpPl=1&dpID=51WGe7jbJ2L&ref=plSrch https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439247153/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=...

mgkimsal 10y ago
excellent read. found it after a neighbor had started floating the idea of me joining his 'business'. had been hit by amway folks before, but I dug in a bit more and found MoD. This all happened in PA, and I'd read it while I was living in PA, so it seemed to feel a bit more 'real' (no idea why though).

creeble 10y ago

I grew up in Grand Rapids, two miles from Amway HQ. Working at the Amway factory (yes, there is [or was] a factory) was my first job after (dropping out of) college. A friend was the HQ tour guide for all the Silvers on their way to becoming Diamonds. He was hilarious. It is an interesting cult. Never quite figured out the attraction; you're either the kind of person who likes / falls for MLM schemes or you aren't I think.

micah_chatt 10y ago
No way! I grew up literally across the river and could see Amway from my bedroom window.

pastProlog 10y ago

Trump is appointing the daughter-in-law of Amway's founder to run the Department of Education. No surprise, she sees it as a money-making (charter school) opportunity for corporations.

maverick_iceman 10y ago
I don't see why she necessarily has to be a bad person just because who her father-in-law is.
- pc86 10y ago
  You misunderstand; she's a bad person because Trump likes her. /s
tomcam 10y ago
I am the grandson of a bootlegger and the son of alcoholics. Doesn't make a me a bootlegger or an alcoholic. The fathers of both President Clinton and President Obama were despicable men; this does not make those Presidents despicable men.

aswanson 10y ago

I am continually stunned at the amount of people, even some whom I'd consider rational enough to see through this pyramid scheme nonsense, approach me with it. Amway, Quixtar, Karatbars, Herbalife...the Ponzi scheme with a Thousand Faces.

pc86 10y ago
Quixtar is just the US/Canada distributor of Amway. They're literally the same company. Also Amway isn't a pyramid scheme. It's stupid and an incredibly risky way to try to make money, but it simply doesn't fit the legal definition of a pyramid scheme. It's pretty easy to dismiss Amway for a whole host of reasons, no reason to do it based on one of the few claims that isn't legitimate.
- XorNot 10y ago
  No it's definitely a pyramid scheme, just carefully structured to avoid that legal definition for pretty obvious reasons.
  - unsignedint 10y ago
    I believe a narrow definition of pyramid scheme is if the payment is made solely for signing someone up under you. If the payment is made through commissions of sales rather than the merely based on new participants sigining up, ai don't think it's legally a pyramid scheme, more of an multi-level marketing scheme, though personally a practice I wouldn't sign up regardless...
    - jbooth 10y ago
      Except the products are 100% overpriced knockoff junk. They're only there, as GP said, to make it just barely not a pyramid scheme in the eyes of the law. Nobody joins Amway because they believe in the products, they join because they believe in the pyramid concept.
      - 10y ago

NelsonMinar 10y ago

Betsy DeVos, the incoming Education Secretary for the US, is the daughter-in-law of one of the Amway founders. http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/11/23/trump-picks-betsy-devos-daughter-in-law-of-billionaire-amway-cofounder-for-education-secretary/#57495cff5313 http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/11/23/trump-pi...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tomcam 10y ago
And what is the value of this information?
- gech 10y ago
  Because it should be evident that there's no way in hell we should be putting someone like her with a background like that into office.

losteverything 10y ago

Decades ago my can't-say-no-mother had this Amway guy at the house. He sold us matches that could strike even under water. It was very valuable to know about Amway at such an early age. Years later the salesman was out of Amway. He apologized to our family. He said he would have sold Amway to president Nixon.

mrbill 10y ago

I did a lot of computer consulting/fix-it work in high school (late 80s/early 90s), and one of my biggest clients was a guy who was the region's "Diamond" / biggest Amway distributor. The first time I showed up at his house, I was surprised to see that he had a two-car garage converted into a pretty nice home office / mini-warehouse. Couple of desks with their computers and printers set up, lots of shelves to store tapes, videos, soap, and other products to be sold.. with a double glass door leading to his indoor pool. We had an agreement: he wouldn't try to sell me or my family anything, and I would fix his computers as needed for money. It worked out well. A few months after I'd started fixing things for him, I got suckered into going to a presentation by a friend (classmate). I'm sitting there on the front row, and the promised Big Important Speaker walks up.. and it's my client. He sees me in the front row. "Bill ,what are you doing here!?" "Hey Robert. A friend asked me to come.." It was rather funny seeing all the people oooh and ahhh over THE AMWAY DIAMOND SELLER and I was just, "Hey, while I'm here.. need anything fixed next week?"

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

stillmbarrassed 10y ago

Amway ruined my childhood. My parents became involved with “the business” in the late ’70s or early ’80s. One of my first memories is of a first grade classmate sharing the news that his parents had “gone direct”. Even at that young age I was aware that this was something my parents had wanted to achieve for a long time, and I wondered why they couldn't - what was wrong with them? Throughout elementary school I came to understand that Amway was for losers. It was not uncommon at that time for Amway to be the punchline or subject of other mockery. So by the time I reached adolescence I had a full-fledged paranoia that friends or classmates would find out. At sleepovers and camping trips I'd have to hide my Glister toothpaste. When friends visited I'd be afraid they'd spot our L.O.C. dish soap. But the worst was when my parents decided to “draw circles” for my friends’ parents. I think this only happened a couple of times - I'm pretty sure I even asked my parents not to do it. My parents are good people, perhaps very naive. I think they are still involved with Amway to this day. I’m sure they never made any money from it, and I shudder to think how much it has cost them. Since I left home for college I don't think we've ever discussed it. I doubt they know how much I resented it.