Shyam
Robert FitzPatrick (whose telephone number has never been a secret) has recently posted this typical conversation between himself and an 'MLM' hopeful.
MLM Hopeful: I just read your article, “The 10 Big Lies of Multi-Level Marketing.” I was wondering when you wrote it and if you still stand by it? FitzPatrick: Are you asking me about something in particular?MLM Hopeful: Well, I’ve heard that Amway is now a $10 billion dollar business with millions of customers and has been around since the 1960s, so how could you say it doesn’t work? You probably wrote that article around 2000. But Amway keeps growing.FitzPatrick: Okay, well first of all, Amway is a private company and nobody outside the owners really knows how big it actually is. The numbers could be hype. They aren’t verified. But I think you are saying that because Amway is so large it must be legitimate, right?MLM Hopeful: It’s huge! So how can you write about lies and collapse?FitzPatrick: This is not sarcasm; but we should remember that the biggest and fastest growing Hedge Fund on Wall Street was Bernie Madoff’s and the fastest growing and most respected company in America at one time was called Enron. I’m just reminding you that big or fast-growing do not automatically mean legitimate. In fact, anything growing fast in a Recession should be examined with special skepticism.MLM Hopeful: You predicted Amway would collapse soon.
FitzPatrick: Actually, my article did not predict collapse for Amway, but failure or “collapse” for the recruits. MLM Hopeful: What do you mean? I am pretty sure you predicted Amway would fall apart. (Looks for a reference in the article but doesn’t find one.)FitzPatrick: Here’s the way “collapse” happens at Amway. It offers a business proposition to millions of consumers in which you pay a fee to join; then you buy Amway products…MLM Hopeful: (Interrupts) Buying products is not required!FitzPatrick: Right, but to get bonuses, you have to meet a quota of “points”. To get your points, you buy qualifying Amway products. Most of the Amway salespeople, or IBOs as they are called, do buy Amway’s products to meet their point quota so they can start getting bonuses, at least they hope they will. In fact, the recruits are just about the only people who ever buy Amway products. It’s called “self-consumption.” That’s where Amway gets its money -- from the salespeople, not from customers.MLM Hopeful: Okay. I buy the products because I use them. I buy toothpaste, so why not buy Amway’s toothpaste?FitzPatrick: Nothing wrong with buying Amway products, if you want to. If you think they are good and competitively priced, why not? But my article, and I thought the reason you called me, had to do whether you as a consumer can make money working as an Amway sales rep. You don’t make money from buying products from Amway, right?MLM Hopeful: No, you make money selling the products.FitzPatrick: Okay, now, have you ever seen anyone actually selling Amway products? There are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of Amway sales people in the US. Shouldn’t we see some of them knocking on doors?MLM Hopeful: Actually, I have seen someone. I saw them selling Amway energy drinks.FitzPatrick: Okay, do you think you can make money selling “energy drinks” person to person, one at a time, on your own? It doesn’t seem very feasible, does it, when people can buy energy drinks, usually for less, in any convenience store? But, the facts are that Amway IBOs really don’t make money from selling the products. They make money by first paying a fee to join, then buying products to meet the points quota and then recruiting other people to do the same thing.MLM Hopeful: What’s wrong with that?FitzPatrick: Well, think about it. If you need to recruit 20 people for you to start making money on their purchases, each of those 20 would also need to do the same thing. That would be 400 more for them to recruit. The 400 they recruited would need 8,000 and the 8,000 would need to recruit 160,000 and they would have to find 2.4 million to be profitable. This is not going to happen. The proposition is not possible. Yet, each new person has to tell all the people they recruit that they can always recruit more. That’s why I say the plan is based on a lie. To see what I mean, just use a calculator, and you can see that the sales force cannot continue expanding forever. In our example, we just went five levels deep and got to over 2 million, and those people would then have to recruit half the households in the USA – to become “salespeople”! Who would be their “customers.” It can’t happen. What does happen is that thousands of people invest, fail and quit each year. That’s what I meant about “collapse.” It is the latest recruits who bear the cost. But as long as Amway can replace them, the company itself stays standing. To do that, it must recruit more and more future losers while telling them all, year after year, that it’s the “greatest income opportunity in the world.”MLM Hopeful: I was told that Amway completely changed its model in 2008 and now people are selling the products and making money and that’s why the company has exploded in size! I think you are talking about the past.FitzPatrick: Well, I have studied their income disclosure statistics and it shows plainly that almost no one makes any money and most of the commissions go to the few at the top. Also, more than half of all Amway salespeople still quit in less than a year. Those figures have not changed. Amway makes it money from the salespeople’s purchases. But, almost none of those salespeople make any money themselves. They turn out to be the “end-users.” That’s how Amway makes money -- from the investments of the salespeople, nearly all of whom get no return on that investment.MLM Hopeful: The company has changed!FitzPatrick: It’s true that Amway was sued by consumers in a class action lawsuit and as a result of that suit Amway has offered to pay millions in restitution and to make some changes in their “tools” business and to lower prices on some Amway products. But that would not affect the basic proposition of pay-to-join, buy-products and then recruit-others-to-do-the-same.
(Dial Tone)
FitzPatrick: Actually, my article did not predict collapse for Amway, but failure or “collapse” for the recruits. MLM Hopeful: What do you mean? I am pretty sure you predicted Amway would fall apart. (Looks for a reference in the article but doesn’t find one.)FitzPatrick: Here’s the way “collapse” happens at Amway. It offers a business proposition to millions of consumers in which you pay a fee to join; then you buy Amway products…MLM Hopeful: (Interrupts) Buying products is not required!FitzPatrick: Right, but to get bonuses, you have to meet a quota of “points”. To get your points, you buy qualifying Amway products. Most of the Amway salespeople, or IBOs as they are called, do buy Amway’s products to meet their point quota so they can start getting bonuses, at least they hope they will. In fact, the recruits are just about the only people who ever buy Amway products. It’s called “self-consumption.” That’s where Amway gets its money -- from the salespeople, not from customers.MLM Hopeful: Okay. I buy the products because I use them. I buy toothpaste, so why not buy Amway’s toothpaste?FitzPatrick: Nothing wrong with buying Amway products, if you want to. If you think they are good and competitively priced, why not? But my article, and I thought the reason you called me, had to do whether you as a consumer can make money working as an Amway sales rep. You don’t make money from buying products from Amway, right?MLM Hopeful: No, you make money selling the products.FitzPatrick: Okay, now, have you ever seen anyone actually selling Amway products? There are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of Amway sales people in the US. Shouldn’t we see some of them knocking on doors?MLM Hopeful: Actually, I have seen someone. I saw them selling Amway energy drinks.FitzPatrick: Okay, do you think you can make money selling “energy drinks” person to person, one at a time, on your own? It doesn’t seem very feasible, does it, when people can buy energy drinks, usually for less, in any convenience store? But, the facts are that Amway IBOs really don’t make money from selling the products. They make money by first paying a fee to join, then buying products to meet the points quota and then recruiting other people to do the same thing.MLM Hopeful: What’s wrong with that?FitzPatrick: Well, think about it. If you need to recruit 20 people for you to start making money on their purchases, each of those 20 would also need to do the same thing. That would be 400 more for them to recruit. The 400 they recruited would need 8,000 and the 8,000 would need to recruit 160,000 and they would have to find 2.4 million to be profitable. This is not going to happen. The proposition is not possible. Yet, each new person has to tell all the people they recruit that they can always recruit more. That’s why I say the plan is based on a lie. To see what I mean, just use a calculator, and you can see that the sales force cannot continue expanding forever. In our example, we just went five levels deep and got to over 2 million, and those people would then have to recruit half the households in the USA – to become “salespeople”! Who would be their “customers.” It can’t happen. What does happen is that thousands of people invest, fail and quit each year. That’s what I meant about “collapse.” It is the latest recruits who bear the cost. But as long as Amway can replace them, the company itself stays standing. To do that, it must recruit more and more future losers while telling them all, year after year, that it’s the “greatest income opportunity in the world.”MLM Hopeful: I was told that Amway completely changed its model in 2008 and now people are selling the products and making money and that’s why the company has exploded in size! I think you are talking about the past.FitzPatrick: Well, I have studied their income disclosure statistics and it shows plainly that almost no one makes any money and most of the commissions go to the few at the top. Also, more than half of all Amway salespeople still quit in less than a year. Those figures have not changed. Amway makes it money from the salespeople’s purchases. But, almost none of those salespeople make any money themselves. They turn out to be the “end-users.” That’s how Amway makes money -- from the investments of the salespeople, nearly all of whom get no return on that investment.MLM Hopeful: The company has changed!FitzPatrick: It’s true that Amway was sued by consumers in a class action lawsuit and as a result of that suit Amway has offered to pay millions in restitution and to make some changes in their “tools” business and to lower prices on some Amway products. But that would not affect the basic proposition of pay-to-join, buy-products and then recruit-others-to-do-the-same.
(Dial Tone)
This conversation, in which Robert FitzPatrick gently tried to stimulate the critical, and evaluative, faculties of a typical 'MLM' hopeful, clearly demonstrates how 'Amway,' and its many copy-cats, hide an exploitative, non-rational belief system, tailored to fit the existing beliefs and instinctual desires of ill-informed individuals and, eventually, dissociate them from external reality. It is evidence like this, that legislators in Kerala should be examining in order for them to arrive at a full-understanding of the threat to democracy, and to the rule of law, that 'MLM income opportunity' fraud represents. No matter what rational argument (supported by quantifiable evidence) 'MLM' believers are confronted with, they will invariably continue to deny the reality that it has always been effectively-impossible to earn an overall net-income from participating in a so-called 'MLM income opportunity.' Thus, the last people whom legislators should be consulting (with regard to this problem), are the deluded victims of 'MLM' or the 'lobbyists' of 'MLM' racketeers.
In many cases, the victims of 'MLM income opportunity' fraud have been indoctrinated to cut themselves off from all rational persons challenging their non-rational beliefs.
David Brear (copyright 2011)
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