The Saga Continues...

For those of you who can't get enough, we have added this additional section which will go into additional detail about our "saga." First, we will begin with some additional background information about how this site came to be.

About the beginning of 1997 we had decided that we had strong disagreements with our upline that we were not going to be able to solve. These areas of disagreement are out-lined on this site, so we will not repeat them here. We had come to the point, as in some marriages, of irreconcilable differences.

Well, we decided we could not traditionally fix the challenges we saw with the business, so we would either have to sell our business or try to fix them in a less traditional way. We sent our upline Diamonds and the Amway Corporation a letter in June of 1997 stating that we wanted to sell our Amway business. This letter was sent to Ken Stewart, Ron & Melanie Rummel, Rick & Eve Maxwell, Mike Collinsworth, Marc & Shelli Hellinghausen and Bob Kirkstra (from Amway.) We stated in this initial letter that we had strong disagreements with the business. We further stated the strongest of our disagreements were with the structure and secrecy of the system. We explained that we were offering our business to our upline Diamonds because they were the only ones who would fully benefit from the income. In other words, we suspected if one of our personally sponsored distributors or even our sponsor (who is a Gold Direct) purchased our business they would not be allowed to receive any of the system income (about half) from our business.

We never heard from any of them.

We knew from the beginning that there was a possibility that our upline would not purchase our business. We knew, therefore, that we might remain distributors. We decided from the beginning that if we were to remain distributors we would try to facilitate a change in the areas we saw as a long-term liability to all distributors. We had been working on this website anticipating the probability that we would not be successful in selling our business for a fair price.

In September of 1997 we sent a copy of this site on CD-ROM to all of the upline previously mentioned along with Bob Kirkstra at the Amway Corporation. We asked them to please give us in writing via our attorney, any inaccuracies they saw in the information.

We have not received any inaccuracies from any member of our upline so far.

In December we received a call from Ron Rummel who wanted to get together without attorneys to talk things out. We had no interest in talking as we had already exhausted all possible areas of discussion. We communicated via our attorney that we would only be interested in having a meeting with our attorneys present to discuss a valuation and possible purchase of our business. After many letters back and forth a meeting was finally set for January 12^th 1998.

The attendees of this meeting were us, our attorneys (2), Ron Rummel, Jody Victor, John Lanier (our sponsor) and a representative from Amway’s Rules and Conduct Dept.

This was a fascinating and insightful meeting. When we arrived, Jody Victor, Ron Rummel and John Lanier were already in attendance. Jody Victor began by saying the Amway Representative had been detained and was not able to be there at the beginning. Jody went on to say that, Amway people are nice but they have all these rules and rules are fine but we are distributors and we know better how things work. That’s nothing we haven’t heard before. We decided to go ahead and begin, although we would have preferred to wait for the Amway Representative. Jody Victor explained that we could not include our system income in the valuation of our business because our distributors were free to buy their tools anywhere they wished. Joni asked Ron if he had ever seen anyone go elsewhere for his or her tools in his 16+ years of experience. He said no. Well, that seems logical then, huh? Jody said the way he dealt with this in his organization was to have everyone sign "pin contracts." Mr. Victor explained that a pin contract bound a distributor to buy their tools only from their upline. In our opinion, this doesn't sound moral or ethical. We certainly don't view a pin contract to be a solution to the challenges we see with the business that we have outlined on this site.

Jody Victor also told us that he had read our site and agreed with mostly everything we had to say. He said he had tried to change things stating that he, "felt like a one legged man in a butt kicking contest" at ADA Board meetings. He told us that as president of the ADA Board, he had achieved little success in affecting the status quo.

As a side note, Joni asked Ron during this meeting if Jon Lanier (our sponsor) would be able to receive the income generated by the sales of tools and functions that we were currently receiving from our organization if John were to purchase our business. Ron said no. John appeared to be in agreement as he said, "I don’t qualify for that." So for those of you who don’t get it, If we sold our business to our sponsor he would get our Amway income. Our portion of the income from the sales of tapes, functions, etc. would then go to our upline. Of course, they are already receiving their portion of the profits of the system sales we generate. They would also get the portion we were receiving without paying a dime. We are sure their portion is much larger than ours!

We gave them a valuation of our business, and we agreed that they had until Feb. 1^st to counter our appraisal. As you may have noticed we had been stalled at this point about seven months.

Of course, when Feb. 1^st came they hadn’t had a chance to get a counter offer together yet. We remember at one point their attorney was sick. The stalls became almost humorous, "I’m out of town, I’m out of the country, Jody is out of the country, We are going on an African Safari…"

They told us during the meeting that they recommended a three-year income for a fair price to pay for an Amway business. We found that humorous when we have been told a hundred times this business creates a willable income. It’s willable to your children, your children’s children, etc. We are also told you put the work in once then you get paid for the rest of your life. One of our attorneys won major points from us when he told Jody Victor, "Mr. Victor, I would like to buy your business for three years of your income." Jody of course declined.

After all was said and done we finally received an offer of one and a half years of our income. Quite honestly, we were willing to sell for five years of income. That was when we made the decision that, as we were to remain distributors we were going to do our best to make the business better and more profitable long-term for all distributors. I suppose this is where we differ from most of the other "Anti-Amway" sites. While we do not in any way discount their individual experiences, we would like to make the Amway business better for all. We are not here merely to knock the business, but to try in the best way we can to change the course of the business. We have not spoken to a distributor (other than our upline!) about this site that doesn’t agree with the beliefs expressed on this site. Some have disagreed with the tactics but not the content. We have yet to hear a better way to effect change. We would love to listen to the comments from others, but as already expressed; we can not give out a contact address without threatening our distributorship. We do not want to throw our business away any more than we want to give it to our upline which is what would happen to the income were we to go away.

One final humorous note: At the point where we had given our upline nine months to make a reasonable offer to purchase our business and when we were going on the web, their attorney wrote to us stating that we never had any intentions of selling our business. After nine months of time and money on attorneys we thought it was quite incredible that they would say that!

Amway finally contacted our attorney just before we went on the internet. They made several requests about our site which we obliged.

So we went on the web March 1^st 1998 after realizing that we would not be able to sell our business for a fair price. We are hopeful that this site will effect positive change. It is hard for us to believe that so many people allow themselves to be treated in such a demeaning manner. All the while these same people are spending their own personal fortunes on the system that chiefly benefits the Diamonds.

Here is an excerpt from a book called Imperfect Control by Judith Viorst which is chilling but perhaps acknowledges more than explains this apparent phenomenon of human behavior: (pp. 252-258) By the way, this is a fascinating read and is not on the tape and book list(!).

Sometimes, when our moral beliefs collide with what an external authority asks of us, we behave in ways we would otherwise view as unthinkable. Surrendering moral control to that authority, we allow ourselves to commit immoral acts. We may commit such acts because we fear for our lives, because we are forced or coerced. But we may behave immorally without any fear of harm, willingly giving up our moral control, our responsibility for our actions, in an obedience to an authority we perceive to be legitimate or unchangeable.

Back in the 1960's, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of deeply troubling experiments, recruiting people to participate in what they were told was a study of the impact of punishment on the learning process. Assigning the recruits to the role of "teachers," the experimenter strapped a "learner" into a chair, telling the teacher to give the learner a test and, every time his answer was wrong, to administer an electrical shock-intensifying the voltage with each mistake. The shocks, which ranged from 15 volts (SLIGHT SHOCK) to 450 volts (DANGER-SEVERE SHOCK), evoked grunts, then pleas to stop ("Experimenter, get me out of here...I can't stand the pain"), then agonized screams, sometimes followed by ominous silence. But whenever the teacher hesitated, expressed concern, insisted he wanted to stop, said, "The guy is suffering in there" or "I'm sorry I can't do that to a man," the person in authority--the experimenter--urged him to go on and complete the experiment. And so, in spite of the learner's ever escalating suffering, and despite of the teacher's unease with the learner's distress, almost two-thirds of the teachers kept on shocking him up to the full 450 volts.

As you already may know--this brilliant study is frequently cited--the learner (unbeknownst to the teachers) was acting; his screams of agony were simulated; he suffered no jolts of electricity. But the teachers, convinced they were causing great pain and convinced-at least in some cases-that this was wrong, were nonetheless unable to challenge authority, choosing, instead, to comply with this "cruel" experiment.

Why?

Bruno Batta, a thirty-seven-year-old welder, said: "I was paid for doing this. I had to follow orders."

Jack Washington, a thirty-five-year-old drill press operator, said: "Because I was following orders...I was told to go on. And I did not get a cue to stop."

Elinor Rosenblum, a housewife, said: "It's an experiment. I'm here for a reason. So I had to do it. You said so. I didn't want to. I was tempted so much to stop and say, 'Look, I'm not going to do it anymore.'...But...I went on with it, much against my will."

And Pasqual Gino, a forty-three-year-old water inspector, said: "I figured...Yale knows what's going on, and if they think it's all right, well...I'll go through with anything they tell me to do." Mr. Gino, who had not considered disobeying the instructions even when he believed that the shocks were fatal, also said: "I faithfully believed the man was dead until we opened the door. When I saw him, I said, 'Great, this is great.' But it didn't bother me even to find that he was dead. I did a job."

Probing beyond these whys of surrendering moral control, Milgram offers the view that a willing submission to authority "is a powerful and prepotent condition in man." Indeed, he maintains that, like having an inborn potential to learn a language, we are born with the potential to obey, a potential which (like language) will develop only within a human social context. He makes the interesting argument that obedience is the prerequisite for a stable, efficient social organization, which--evolutionarily--has great survival value and which is characterized by a hierarchy, a division of labor--and a significant loss of personal control. For as members of society, we will find ourselves in countless situations where we're deferring to the authority of others, beginning with our parents and moving on to our teachers and bosses, and usually being rewarded (by loving approval or A-pluses or a promotion) only if we are willing to obey. When people, Milgram continues, have been "civilized" in this way, they internalize the concept of compliance.

This tendency toward compliance is what, says Milgram, his subjects brought into the lab. He sees the process then unfolding like this:

They willingly signed on for the experiment.

They viewed the experimenter as a legitimate authority.

They wished to do a good job for this authority.

They accepted his definition of a "good job."

And they felt--this is important--that they were responsible to the authority, but not for the content of the job they were doing.

Those who, sooner or later, wished to stop shocking the learners, says Milgram, were often unable to act upon their wishes, even when they insisted, "He can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man in there." They continued because they didn't want to renounce the commitment they'd made to the authority or because they were concerned with hurting his feelings. They also continued because they were filled with anxiety, an anxiety that was produced by their daring to think of breaching a fundamental social rule, by their daring to think of disobeying authority.

Perhaps all this helps explain why, with what Milgram calls a "numbing regularity," the decent, responsible people who engaged in this experiment were able to act so callously, so harshly, "unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, free of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority." He concludes that his experiments "raise the possibility that human nature...cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhuman treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do.

Outside the lab, there's abundant and quite terrifying evidence that a substantial proportion of people do what they're told. And though you and I are convinced that we'd be incapable of engaging in such atrocities, we mustn't forget that those who did were, for the most part, ordinary people.

In trying to understand the moral submission to a leader like Jim Jones, therapist Max Rosenbaum, the editor of a book called compliant behavior, focuses on the "promise of transcendence that they offered their disciples," generating the feeling that they--the followers, the disciples--belonged to something larger than themselves.

O.K., in case you are wondering we are not comparing the actions of our upline to those of Jim Jones. To do so is to belittle the horrors that were experienced as a result of his beliefs and actions. What we are doing is trying to understand how so many people can seemingly abdicate their own personal moral boundaries. We have, ourselves experienced this phenomenon on many occasions and in many different flavors while in the business. There were hundreds and hundreds of occasions we saw our upline making policies and statements that we thought to be wrong and hurtful to others. We didn't say a thing. It's like we were in a fog that we have now come out of. One point we don't think was made in the excerpt from Imperfect Control was that the subjects were being PAID. I'm sure, if only on a subconscious level they, like we Amway distributors, are keeping our brains and mouths shut due to greed. We have come to see what a destructive force this greed is.

We hope this section helps to explain a bit more of our situation. See, we told you we were no better than anyone else!

Last modified: July 14, 1998