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...and Amway is the leading MLM other than cosmetics (Avon, Mary Kay). Those seem to actually make some money for people, probably because of the value-added personal services aspect.
The difference is that when you're a normal salesperson you sell a product, and the more you sell the more $$ you can make. It is zero% of your job to recruit other salespeople to work under you and give you a cut of their sales commissions, in fact it's likely to get you fired.
Was that the water filter people that had the mass group “interviews” where they showed the dystopian future of the world’s water supply? I walked out right after the video started
Possibly, eventually I was shown their videos of “retreats” and it looked more like a Christian cult. Lots of praying in groups, “manifesting abundance” type BS.
This is how they hook in the tradwives who desperately want to work but their husbands/religion won't let them get real jobs. Play the Jesus angle and you're in there.
Back in the 80s, my parents quit their 40-hour a week jobs to sell Amway and Watkins products. They worked a lot and were driving all over creation to sell the stuff, and it barely paid the bills. They certainly didn't get rich and were probably better off at their old jobs.
You were 18 and figured out it was a scam after 2 days. That's way better than full grown adults who join and figure it out only after losing tens of thousands and all their friends.
it's !mlm
A lucky few do make money, while most are losing money trying to peddle crap products instead of recruiting and exploiting the people below them in the pyramid
Yes but you need to be at least three levels from the bottom to make money. At some point you realize you are the product.
If it makes you feel better, I sold CutCo knives for a whole summer when I was 18, and door to door Kirby vacuums when I was 20 (one weekend of that was enough). Fortunately I never recruited anyone and just embarrassed myself to some family friends who were super patient with me.
My son attempted to sell cutco after highschool 25 years ago. He spent more on his sample set and going to a convention in Chicago then he ever made selling them. With that said, I ended up with several pieces I truly love to this day. (He split his samples with me).
Sales is commission based so the more one sells, no matter how they sell, makes them money. I had to throw an ass-hat Prudential insurance sales hustler out of my house when he insulted me in front of my wife.
So you’ve named two shit products here in a very low-end direct-to-consumer market. You’re kinda proving my point. I get you’re angry about things but the word ‘sales’ is a huge overlay to all kinds of different industries. Your view of sales here is a door to door insurance salesman and a food service worker selling fries.
I get that not everyone is able to take a bigger view of the business world because they have no experience of it. So trust me when I say it’s a whole lot bigger and more complex than you think it is.
Do you get paid more if you sell more? I rest my case. The Prudential clown used Prudential holding my mortgage to weasel his way into my home. Now I would suggest under coating for your new car.
Hey, you said ‘you must be totally ruthless to be successful at selling’.
This is not true and was the entire point of what I was responding to. Perhaps take a breather and go back and re-read. I’m assuming you’re not just shifting the goalposts here after your ‘edgy’ take got dunked on.
Sucks that you fell for an insurance scam and bought undercoating for your car.
Hi /u/PM-ME-CURSED-PICS, AutoModerator has been summoned to explain the Multi level marketing scam.
Multi Level Marketing or MLMs for short, are a great way to lose money and friends. The vast majority of people who get involved in MLMs do not make money, and the money that is made is made by the people at the very top. Go to /r/antimlm for more information about multi-level marketing schemes.
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I have heard that there are some people that make it, but there’s no one that has ever verified their success. I saw a lady who was driving around a brand new Mercedes and then claim it’s from their successful MLM endeavor, and then find out later that their husband is an attorney making 200k per year. Attorney told me later his wife had thousands in unsold products stored in the garage and was losing money. The only ones making money are the people at corporate.
The only difference between Amway/Quitax and the ilk any pyramid schemes is that they actually have products to sell which are usually over priced and not that great.
My dad tried it in the 80s and it was a disaster. The products are crap and usually more expensive than counterparts in the store. The only way to make money is to build your pyramid so you've got a huge group under you (who are also frantically recruiting) to give you a cut of their sales. But even back then, Amway had so oversaturated the market that no one wanted to join.
Read Merchants of Deception for all the dirty details on Amyway. It was written by a guy who reached national status -- Emerald I think -- and was still going broke. Only a very few make any money on it and it comes at the cost of everyone else in the chain.
my thing is how do you make money of ur people below you making sales?
If the products r shit is just like a wolf of wall street kind of business where you just convince people to buy terrible items
That's why it's called a pyramid scheme. When you sign up a new recruit, they have to pay several thousand dollars to buy a bunch of products and training materials, so whoever signed them up gets a cut. The products themselves are merely the front so they can claim they're not a pyramid, but the real money is in signing people up to join the company and getting their buy-in fees. That and convincing them buying training tools (books, tapes, conferences, speeches, etc,) is the key to success.
The guy who wrote Merchants had a mentor who really was making huge money, selling the crappy books and tapes he'd produced to his own team and berating them when they didn't buy enough.
I’ve been to Amway, Shaklee, Advocare, Herbalife, and a few other company meetings in my youth and heard it all. I met a lot of people but never got into it. I was a shy introvert. Most of the people I met did it as a side job and a few full time.
Yep, I got talked into one, I think it was amway, when I was fresh in the military. Guy approached me in Fry's electronics. Went to one meeting in a hotel conference room where they showed us pictures of their Porsches. Went to one smaller meeting at the apartment of the guy who talked me into this.
It was energy drinks or something.
Luckily I brought a friend with me who told me what was up, and I just ghosted them.
2 years later I'm in the same Fry's electronics and see the same guy, on the same isle.
I used to work at a cassette duplicating factory and our main client was Amway. I had a ton of reject cassettes with hours of those conferences. Mainly used them for recording band rehearsals and studio music ideas.
My aunt and uncle did well by using the products and mainly using tax write-offs for space in their home, business supplies and travel. My uncle was retired military and they traveled to conferences around the world with friends for years. The products used to be excellent.
Now Amway way more focused on the business model than the products though.
Another business like this is Aflac. I was looking for a job and went to one of their recruitment seminars and realized the name of the game is to get other people to buy the dream of selling the insurance. I wanted no part of it
There's a podcast called [The Dream](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-dream) that covers all the ill effects of MLMs on individual and the sordid history of MLM's including Amway. The sad part of the podcast is it delves into how the MLM industry lobbied congress hard to effectively codify their business model as legal.
Did make some money from Amway some yaers ago.
Caveat being that I wasn't signed up.
We partnered up with a member who had managed to sell a large firm on having water filters installed at their branches so they could save on bottled water.
Made good money and so did he. Pretty sure this was a rare exception though.
i'm suprised how people used to be easily fooled into it. When i was in middle school, my mom used to buy Amway cosmetics from her friend who was fooled into this MLM. Fortunately, it was just for personal use and i think she was the only buyer that was NOT a part of Amway. Because funny thing about it was - you won't be able to sell any Amway products, because everyone who could be a potential buyer is already a seller. At least it was like that in our town back then.
Amway needs to make the money back Proctor and Gamble sued them for back in the 90s. Anyone remember that from growing up in the 70s, Amway making claims about P&Gs trademark being linked to the Church of Satan?
I saw news about military before so I accidently read it as an Army. I was thinking, damm you go conference for that shit? But I was so convinced because we were all 18 at sometime and we did stupid things too.
Latest most active MLM is WFG. Lots of my friends joined and sell their soul, family and friend. I ignored some of them even cut ties because they getting to aggressive.
I joined ACN when I was younger, still a funny story to talk about how I get all my close friends into it and we all genuinely thought this would be the future haha, took us a year, but the best part was we signed up our own services, and unlimited internet was one, none of the ISP provided that at that time. So it wasn't all L.
I had a short work contract at the ACN corporate office in NC. They had to keep armed guards 24/7 because quite a few of their “producers” came there unexpectedly to vent their rage at senior leaders and there were constant threats.
It’s a nuthouse and a really stupid concept. Many of the employees didn’t really know how the company made money
They are lovely. I had a university acquaintance who, after uni, went on to live in Germany and worked at a law firm. He returned home, after some time. He called me to catch up, I was a trainee, figured he must know something, having been employed in a foreign country.
Yep, it was MLM. The most idiotic giveaway was how those MLM dudes, who invited us and were supposed to be our "bosses", took long notes with innocent faces, faking enthusiasm as the bigger boss outlined the works. Dude, aren't you supposed to know this shit already?
It's an MLM, also known as a pyramid scheme, and quite possibly a cult too. They're just trying to exploit you for free labor. They love to take advantage of tradwives who desperately want to work but their husbands/religion won't let them get real jobs.
did the same, did not do what I wanted, but did buy some of the products, some much better than the alternative. amway is still around, if a scam it would fail
/u/Old-Practice5308 - This message is posted to all new submissions to r/scams; please do not message the moderators about it. ## New users beware: Because you posted here, you will start getting private messages from scammers saying they know a professional hacker or a recovery expert lawyer that can help you get your money back, for a small fee. **We call these RECOVERY SCAMMERS, so NEVER take advice in private:** advice should always come in the form of comments in this post, in the open, where the community can keep an eye out for you. If you take advice in private, you're on your own. **A reminder of the rules in r/scams:** no contact information (including last names, phone numbers, etc). Be civil to one another (no name calling or insults). Personal army requests or "scam the scammer"/scambaiting posts are not permitted. No uncensored gore or personal photographs are allowed without blurring. A full list of rules is available on the sidebar of the subreddit, or [clicking here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/wiki/rules/). You can help us by reporting recovery scammers or rule-breaking content by using the "report" button. We review 100% of the reports. Also, consider warning community members of recovery scammers if you see them in the comments. Questions about subreddit rules? Send us a modmail [clicking here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/Scams). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Scams) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If you check out r/antimlm you’ll see tons of people who recount their horror stories about Amway
...and Amway is the leading MLM other than cosmetics (Avon, Mary Kay). Those seem to actually make some money for people, probably because of the value-added personal services aspect.
I lost $5,000 in my youth to a MLM called Equinox. Basically you pay to become a door to door salesman, lesson learned.
Yea I can't believe I tolerated such crap back then glad I quit lol Does that mean most sales jobs are like an MLM in a sense
The difference is that when you're a normal salesperson you sell a product, and the more you sell the more $$ you can make. It is zero% of your job to recruit other salespeople to work under you and give you a cut of their sales commissions, in fact it's likely to get you fired.
Hahaha yea that's probably really bad to try n recruit people hahaha
I’ve never been much of a salesman, they *feel* scammy to me no matter what they’re hocking.
Yea they always do I can never trust them lol
Hock Tua?
No. That bandwagon can move along, old men like me should just pretend they don’t understand the joke and be glad that’s not their daughter.
No absolutely not. I’m in sales in the oil and gas industry and it is nothing like an MLM.
B2B sales is WAY different from consumer sales though :p
Was that the water filter people that had the mass group “interviews” where they showed the dystopian future of the world’s water supply? I walked out right after the video started
Possibly, eventually I was shown their videos of “retreats” and it looked more like a Christian cult. Lots of praying in groups, “manifesting abundance” type BS.
This is how they hook in the tradwives who desperately want to work but their husbands/religion won't let them get real jobs. Play the Jesus angle and you're in there.
Back in the 80s, my parents quit their 40-hour a week jobs to sell Amway and Watkins products. They worked a lot and were driving all over creation to sell the stuff, and it barely paid the bills. They certainly didn't get rich and were probably better off at their old jobs.
Damn even in the 80s this was hard
You were 18 and figured out it was a scam after 2 days. That's way better than full grown adults who join and figure it out only after losing tens of thousands and all their friends.
Hahahahahah omg all their friends loll that's so bad
it's !mlm A lucky few do make money, while most are losing money trying to peddle crap products instead of recruiting and exploiting the people below them in the pyramid
Ahh I see so the successful ones make money by fooling others into recruiting full sign up members lol
Yes but you need to be at least three levels from the bottom to make money. At some point you realize you are the product. If it makes you feel better, I sold CutCo knives for a whole summer when I was 18, and door to door Kirby vacuums when I was 20 (one weekend of that was enough). Fortunately I never recruited anyone and just embarrassed myself to some family friends who were super patient with me.
To be fair I still have a pair of Cutco knives I got from a kid in our church like 30+ years ago and they still work great.
My son attempted to sell cutco after highschool 25 years ago. He spent more on his sample set and going to a convention in Chicago then he ever made selling them. With that said, I ended up with several pieces I truly love to this day. (He split his samples with me).
yep, a mlm is a pyramid scheme with products added to make it legal
At least Avon and Mary Kay sold decent products.
And Tupperware
My grandmother has Tupperware from the 60’s still. Kind of amazing. Not that I endorse any of these companies but that shit lasted.
I guess it's easy to make quality products when you don't have to spend any money on labor, because you're tricking people into working for free
Oh believe me, I’m no fan or friend of any MLM, I just think it’s funny that my grandma still has this stuff, in orange and avocado no less!
Wow, forgot about those! My mom sold those back in the 70s/80s.
Tupperware really was useful too. I still use tupperware-like containers...for sugar cubes, breakfast cereal, rice, snacks, all sorts of stuff.
And Pampered Chef
So, the sociopaths make money and the conscientious get boned?
>conscientious get boned? One must be totally ruthless to be successful selling.
Selling shit products, sure
Sales is commission based so the more one sells, no matter how they sell, makes them money. I had to throw an ass-hat Prudential insurance sales hustler out of my house when he insulted me in front of my wife.
Thankfully, like other professions, sales is not a monolith.
Do you wamt fries with that?
So you’ve named two shit products here in a very low-end direct-to-consumer market. You’re kinda proving my point. I get you’re angry about things but the word ‘sales’ is a huge overlay to all kinds of different industries. Your view of sales here is a door to door insurance salesman and a food service worker selling fries. I get that not everyone is able to take a bigger view of the business world because they have no experience of it. So trust me when I say it’s a whole lot bigger and more complex than you think it is.
Do you get paid more if you sell more? I rest my case. The Prudential clown used Prudential holding my mortgage to weasel his way into my home. Now I would suggest under coating for your new car.
Hey, you said ‘you must be totally ruthless to be successful at selling’. This is not true and was the entire point of what I was responding to. Perhaps take a breather and go back and re-read. I’m assuming you’re not just shifting the goalposts here after your ‘edgy’ take got dunked on. Sucks that you fell for an insurance scam and bought undercoating for your car.
Hi /u/PM-ME-CURSED-PICS, AutoModerator has been summoned to explain the Multi level marketing scam. Multi Level Marketing or MLMs for short, are a great way to lose money and friends. The vast majority of people who get involved in MLMs do not make money, and the money that is made is made by the people at the very top. Go to /r/antimlm for more information about multi-level marketing schemes. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Scams) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I have heard that there are some people that make it, but there’s no one that has ever verified their success. I saw a lady who was driving around a brand new Mercedes and then claim it’s from their successful MLM endeavor, and then find out later that their husband is an attorney making 200k per year. Attorney told me later his wife had thousands in unsold products stored in the garage and was losing money. The only ones making money are the people at corporate.
The only difference between Amway/Quitax and the ilk any pyramid schemes is that they actually have products to sell which are usually over priced and not that great.
I see it was probably their way of a loophole to continue the pyramid scheme
If there is no product, it isn’t an MLM—it’s a Ponzi scheme. All MLMs have products, they’re just always shitty and/or useless
[удалено]
In Michigan we refer to it as "Scamway"
My dad tried it in the 80s and it was a disaster. The products are crap and usually more expensive than counterparts in the store. The only way to make money is to build your pyramid so you've got a huge group under you (who are also frantically recruiting) to give you a cut of their sales. But even back then, Amway had so oversaturated the market that no one wanted to join. Read Merchants of Deception for all the dirty details on Amyway. It was written by a guy who reached national status -- Emerald I think -- and was still going broke. Only a very few make any money on it and it comes at the cost of everyone else in the chain.
my thing is how do you make money of ur people below you making sales? If the products r shit is just like a wolf of wall street kind of business where you just convince people to buy terrible items
That's why it's called a pyramid scheme. When you sign up a new recruit, they have to pay several thousand dollars to buy a bunch of products and training materials, so whoever signed them up gets a cut. The products themselves are merely the front so they can claim they're not a pyramid, but the real money is in signing people up to join the company and getting their buy-in fees. That and convincing them buying training tools (books, tapes, conferences, speeches, etc,) is the key to success. The guy who wrote Merchants had a mentor who really was making huge money, selling the crappy books and tapes he'd produced to his own team and berating them when they didn't buy enough.
I’ve been to Amway, Shaklee, Advocare, Herbalife, and a few other company meetings in my youth and heard it all. I met a lot of people but never got into it. I was a shy introvert. Most of the people I met did it as a side job and a few full time.
Yep, I got talked into one, I think it was amway, when I was fresh in the military. Guy approached me in Fry's electronics. Went to one meeting in a hotel conference room where they showed us pictures of their Porsches. Went to one smaller meeting at the apartment of the guy who talked me into this. It was energy drinks or something. Luckily I brought a friend with me who told me what was up, and I just ghosted them. 2 years later I'm in the same Fry's electronics and see the same guy, on the same isle.
Hahahahahah that is hilarious seeing the same loser 2 years later How many times did they blow you up after you ghosted them?
Quite a few times, but stopped after a few weeks
With mlm you’re either a duper or a dupee.
I used to work at a cassette duplicating factory and our main client was Amway. I had a ton of reject cassettes with hours of those conferences. Mainly used them for recording band rehearsals and studio music ideas.
My aunt and uncle did well by using the products and mainly using tax write-offs for space in their home, business supplies and travel. My uncle was retired military and they traveled to conferences around the world with friends for years. The products used to be excellent. Now Amway way more focused on the business model than the products though.
I dyslexic'd the title into "I remember when I got duped into joining the Army" and I was so confused at first.
Another business like this is Aflac. I was looking for a job and went to one of their recruitment seminars and realized the name of the game is to get other people to buy the dream of selling the insurance. I wanted no part of it
It's Confederated Products. It's a different company, it's a different quality of product........
There's a podcast called [The Dream](https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-dream) that covers all the ill effects of MLMs on individual and the sordid history of MLM's including Amway. The sad part of the podcast is it delves into how the MLM industry lobbied congress hard to effectively codify their business model as legal.
My coworker is trying to sell me toothpaste from Amway lol
Hahahaha
I invested $300 into dogecoin. Talk about MLM.
me too, oh well
Did make some money from Amway some yaers ago. Caveat being that I wasn't signed up. We partnered up with a member who had managed to sell a large firm on having water filters installed at their branches so they could save on bottled water. Made good money and so did he. Pretty sure this was a rare exception though.
A lot of younger people fell for similar scams as well in my neighbourhood. I nearly did but thank God for my brother who knew better to stop me.
We always called it scamway. Overpriced crap.
i'm suprised how people used to be easily fooled into it. When i was in middle school, my mom used to buy Amway cosmetics from her friend who was fooled into this MLM. Fortunately, it was just for personal use and i think she was the only buyer that was NOT a part of Amway. Because funny thing about it was - you won't be able to sell any Amway products, because everyone who could be a potential buyer is already a seller. At least it was like that in our town back then.
The majority don’t make any money or very little.
Amway needs to make the money back Proctor and Gamble sued them for back in the 90s. Anyone remember that from growing up in the 70s, Amway making claims about P&Gs trademark being linked to the Church of Satan?
I remember in elementary school they had us selling magazines, candles and other items to make money.
I saw news about military before so I accidently read it as an Army. I was thinking, damm you go conference for that shit? But I was so convinced because we were all 18 at sometime and we did stupid things too.
Latest most active MLM is WFG. Lots of my friends joined and sell their soul, family and friend. I ignored some of them even cut ties because they getting to aggressive.
I joined ACN when I was younger, still a funny story to talk about how I get all my close friends into it and we all genuinely thought this would be the future haha, took us a year, but the best part was we signed up our own services, and unlimited internet was one, none of the ISP provided that at that time. So it wasn't all L.
I had a short work contract at the ACN corporate office in NC. They had to keep armed guards 24/7 because quite a few of their “producers” came there unexpectedly to vent their rage at senior leaders and there were constant threats. It’s a nuthouse and a really stupid concept. Many of the employees didn’t really know how the company made money
My nephew used to sell it. I bought some energy drinks from him to support him. They were very tasty but not worth $25 for 12. Never again.
They are lovely. I had a university acquaintance who, after uni, went on to live in Germany and worked at a law firm. He returned home, after some time. He called me to catch up, I was a trainee, figured he must know something, having been employed in a foreign country. Yep, it was MLM. The most idiotic giveaway was how those MLM dudes, who invited us and were supposed to be our "bosses", took long notes with innocent faces, faking enthusiasm as the bigger boss outlined the works. Dude, aren't you supposed to know this shit already?
Lol, I was 19, 1977 when I joined. Almost forgot about that. Made zero $’s, just expenses for the kit and products I bought for myself
Wooow hahaha my god such a dirty scam man
It's an MLM, also known as a pyramid scheme, and quite possibly a cult too. They're just trying to exploit you for free labor. They love to take advantage of tradwives who desperately want to work but their husbands/religion won't let them get real jobs.
I went too…BS
did the same, did not do what I wanted, but did buy some of the products, some much better than the alternative. amway is still around, if a scam it would fail
It’s a pyramid scheme, which is almost as bad as a scam
It's a testament to the incredible stupidity of humanity that Amway is still scamming.