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Vanessa's Amway/Quixtar Story |
| My Life in Amway/Quixtar In the late 80’s,when my husband received a call about a “consortium of business people putting together a business opportunity in our area” and received a tape that was a lot of rah-rah but gave absolutely no facts, I was suspicious this was Amway. I’d had relatives involved with Amway years before and their experience was not positive. I let my husband attend the open meeting and he brought home a bunch of tapes for us to listen to. I listened to enough to know they all said the same thing – this is a great opportunity and you’re stupid if you don’t get involved. But still I had no facts. The man who contacted my husband came to the house to show me the plan and when he drew out a plan that showed a $50,000 per year diamond income and then pulled out the Profiles of Success, I knew something was fishy. We already made that much money and didn’t live like those photos. He took a list of names from us, taught my husband how to hand out tapes and sold us tickets to a major function about 2 hours away featuring some guy named Dexter Yager. It took a month before we ever got a kit and I was able to see what kind of stuff I was supposed to use and be getting other people to use. At that time, the prices were still pretty competitive because no one else was concentrating their products. I reluctantly went along with my husband because he saw it as his ticket to financial success. He never intended it to be his sole means of employment; even he could see that it wasn’t wise to put all his eggs in the Amway basket. This was merely diversification, just as they preached. When we got started, you still had product call-in and product pick-up, which proved to be a problem, especially after we built up a group, since our sponsor was from another town. According to Amway rules, if you lived more than an hour from your sponsor, they were supposed to ship the products to you, but we had to argue the point and finally go upline to complain. For some reason, all these people who had preached about integrity and how upright and good the business was, didn’t like it if you actually expected them to follow the rules. When we finally hit 4000PV and stayed at that level for a few months, our upline Pearl authorized us to order straight from the warehouse, which made things much easier. No more waiting forever for products and having to drive sometimes an hour to get them. Because we were a growing group, we kept waiting for the upline help to come because we’d heard time and again if you went out and built it and showed promise, you’d get help from a big pin upline. That help finally came after we’d been in the business for about 4 years and only because our direct wanted to go Pearl. Our group was not big enough to support Silver volume but they pushed us to order extra cases of product to have on hand and we went Silver. The next year we didn’t requalify for obvious reasons – the group wasn’t’ big enough to maintain the volume. Two years later, that Pearl wanted to go Emerald so we were pushed again, this time to go Direct. Again the group wasn’t large enough to sustain the volume and we didn’t requalify again for 3 more years. In the meantime, we had several legs under us go Silver but they were one-time deals because of special promotions of cookware or water treatment systems. I think I still have a WTS under the stairs somewhere. One of my biggest disappointments was the lack of promised recognition. Maslow’s studies have shown that people will work hard for recognition and a pat on the back alone. We worked our fannies off and got none. When we went Silver, instead of getting to say a few words, we were herded across stage with a large group and got to say our names. When we went Direct, we got 2 minutes onstage to give a brief speech. We also expected more responsibility at local functions and it never came. People newer in the business to us and with fewer people in the seats got to speak at functions while we sat in the audience taking notes. I mentioned in an earlier post that no one from the upline showed up at my retirement party. I was deeply hurt by that, but let it slide because I was home where I wanted to be. I worked for over a year after we went Direct and believe me, I was basically working 2 jobs because of the extra work that goes along with being a Direct. Another hurt was when my husband had major surgery and no one even acknowledged that he had been in the hospital in ICU and was at home and out of work for 6 weeks. They just wanted to know why he couldn’t come to the meetings. They really loved us, didn’t they? When you’re Direct, you also get to work at major functions. I’d work ticket tables and tool tables; my husband would work the doors and chauffeur speakers in the Cadillac we were pressured to buy. We’d never hear a word of the function and when we dared to ask about why we had to buy a ticket when we worked, we were told we were ungrateful because it was an “honor” to work at a Yager function. I’ve never known a professional organization that didn’t comp your fee if you performed a major service to the function. I belong to a national group now that will comp my entire conference fee if I give a one-hour workshop. No… it’s not MLM. I’m not stupid enough to get into another of those. It’s a legitimate business organization that supports the line of work I’m in now. I’m REALLY self-employed now, own my own business with no upline telling me how to do things and am paid fairly for my performance. I work when I want; I take off when I want. When we first got in Amway, there was huge growth. Lots of pins broke at every function and we felt there was hope for us. After the switch to Quixtar, we saw slowed growth. We believe our major demise was the introduction of a program called HSD – Home Shopping Delivered. Of course, we all know that the couple who started this, Joe and Doris Shaw, were crooks. After this it was a downward spiral for us. We’d build a group, our upline would “posture” them til they quit. And they did it to all their legs. We watched one couple nearly end up divorced over the business. Another young couple with small children was held responsible for $1000’s in tickets they hadn’t sold to their downline and prospects. Our departure from the business began with a missed mini rally because one of our children had a school function we needed to attend. After all, weren’t we building this to be able to spend time with our kids? It took less than 24 hours for the Amvox messages to start coming in and criticizing us. As you know, missing a single meeting is a sign that you’re not dedicated to the business. We’d never missed a single meeting in 11 years and we miss one and the you-know-what hit the fan. And speaking of you-know-what, once you get to start being backstage a little, you see the “off stage” personas of the speakers. They aren’t the goody-two-shoes they pretend to be onstage. They are crude and petty and demanding little prima donnas. If they were my children, I’d spank their behinds and send them to their rooms. The next function after the missed mini rally was a Yager function. We attended and were basically ignored. Our downline had apparently been told all about our lack of dedication and they avoided us as well. We’d been unhappy for about half a year but this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and we never attended another function. We emailed our upline and downline simultaneously and told them all we were quitting because we felt the business no longer worked and because we were tired of the never-ending string of lies and broken promises. We gave specifics, named names and laid it all on the line. The upline wasn’t too happy, but at that point we didn’t care. We just wanted out. We were labeled as losers who had lost their dream and quit, and we were accused of being the ones who lied. On the contrary, we had finally opened our eyes and figured out we’d never get our dreams by pouring $3000 a month into the system. And as for the lies, we were told that we obviously weren’t doing everything we could to go Emerald because look at Joe and Doris Shaw. They went Diamond in a year. And look at the Storms. They jumped several pin levels in a year. But no one pointed out that the Shaws bought their business rather than build it from the ground up. And the Storms jumped several pin levels because a downline Diamond quit and Storms inherited all their legs, thus giving them the extra legs in width. Honesty? Integrity? I think not. We quit altogether after that last major function. I turned what was left of my downline over to the lesser of my upline evils. And then I spent a year calling and apologizing to people for getting them dragged into the mess. I felt especially bad for the couple who was counseled by upline to buy lots of tools and eventually ended up losing their home. I saw them recently and we had a long talk. Thankfully they do not hold any grudge against us. I’m still semi-retired. As I said earlier, I do some freelance work and love it. My children are happy, healthy adults with college degrees and making their way in the world. My husband enjoys his job and now has time for hobbies. We own a weekend vacation place nearby and escape there nearly every weekend in summer. Our retirement accounts are healthy. We have no debt but for a house payment and the usual monthly bills. Of course when you pump an extra $3000 a month into your budget, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. Want to know some secrets? I built the business to direct without ever listening to tapes regularly. I’d hear enough of one in the car with my husband or overhear conversations at meetings and could quote enough to get by. After all, they’re all basically the same: lots of rah-rah, the usual talk about how this is the best business opportunity in the world, talk about their fabulous lifestyle, then one tidbit of business building that was usually just a modified version of something someone else had already said on another tape. I really should be awarded an Academy Award for best actress in a supporting role for the performance I gave during our Amway/Quixtar tenure. I know the Quixtar advocates out there will read this and automatically call me a loser. Doesn’t hurt me. I know I’m not a loser because I worked the business, built it to direct and it just doesn’t work. Einstein defined stupidity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We felt that building Quixtar was stupid because the results were always the same. We had nothing to show for our efforts. A few little tidbits in closing: It’s NOT just a decision, because if it was, I’d have been a Diamond. The facts DO count. To know and not do IS to know, especially when you know it’s wrong. Arrogance is not posture. System costs ARE an expense and not an investment. |
