Just keep listening to tapes, they'll make you feel better!  The tapes will tell stories of greater suffering than yours.  The tapes will make you feel like it's normal to not make your house payment so you can attend a major function.  There's even a tape that tells you how many months you can skip the house payment before you're foreclosed on!   This is normal!  The tapes will even tell you how to ditch those pesky relatives who are raining on your parade!  Ignore them, avoid them!  You'll show them one day!  The more you suffer, the more successful you will be someday!  You'll hear on the tapes, that it's not so bad to live on Positrim Bars, even if you're not on a diet.  You will reap great rewards some day!

The reality is that very little of the propaganda your upline likes to feed you is true.  Maybe a few people at the top have profited from the business, but they are a very few.  How many rallies have you been to with hundreds or even thousands of people in attendance, and they ask that all the new pins cross stage, and there's no one or maybe one or two.  I find it really hard to believe that out of all those people, no one has worked hard enough or suffered enough to reach a pin level, or if they had reached a level, that no one reached the next?

The reality is that the longer you stay in, the more tools you will buy, and your direct needs for you to keep buying those tools.  Ever notice how upline keeps a graph of everyone in the downline on tools?  They say it's to keep track of those who are serious enough about the business.  I suspect that this is not true.  I am convinced that tools are their bread and butter.

When my husband and I found some tools that are still being used, at a garage sale of an EX-EMERALD in our area, this was frowned upon.  Why?  You tell me.  Could it be that they can't make money off of something that isn't bought through them?  It was told to us several times that many of the books were mainstream books that could be bought at any bookstore. So, why are they being ordered through an AMO?  Why would you pay shipping and wait for two weeks for a book you could have that very day, cheaper?  Does that really make any sense?  Why don't they just make a reference list?

I remember the first open I attended.  It was just another house plan, except for it was at a local inn in a bigger room!  I thought this was strange.  I couldn't understand why it was so imperative that we hire a sitter and be there when we didn't even have any prospects going.  We had seen this all before.  I told my husband that it seemed more like an attempt to brainwash.   He thought I was being silly.  But, we went to the seminar the next day.  Again, the same thing.  The rally that night, the same thing!  The only difference was that the little woman was allowed to speak!

We kept repeating this weekend about once a month, not to mention all the house plans during the weeks between.  I finally quit going to a lot of the "meetings and functions".  It was really making me quite queasy.  This of course caused some friction between my husband and myself and the upline gods.  But, once I quit attending a lot of these "seminars" and the such, it was like the fog that was sort of clouding my common sense lifted.  I quit listening to a tape a day and took a step back and realized that this business was all wrong.

 We were much worse off than when we started the business.  We were losing money fast.  We were no longer able to do anything but go to meetings and were having a hard time even keeping food in the house.  When you are told that all it costs to start the business is $150.00, it is an absolute lie!  It is STRONGLY SUGGESTED that you attend every meeting and function, if you say no, they will hound you unmercifully!  These functions can really add up to big bucks.  Have you ever heard Amway distributors bragg about their huge tax returns?  This means they lost a whole bunch of money!

The products cost a small fortune themselves.  Go to your local grocery store and compare the cost.  Remember to take into account the shipping and handling, etc..Also, remember that a lot of the time the products don't come when they're supposed to, so you must buy negative products to hold you over until they arrive.  In the meantime, the products ordered have already been paid for.  And then there are the times that downline cannot pay for their orders.  Yes, there is a money back guarantee, but the items must be paid for first.  And guess who pays?

One of my biggest gripes though, are the tapes.  I personally see this as an attempt to gain mind control pure and simple.  My upline once commented on how Amway was considered as a cult by some, but that at least it was a success cult.  Pardon me, but the reason cults are considered bad is because only a few elite members benefit.  The rest are just seen as money machines.  Sure, the leaders of the cult make the members feel like they are important, loved and cared for, but for a price.  As soon as a member of a cult runs out of money, or questions authority, the leaders no longer have use for them.  This can be emotionally as well as financially devastating.

One of the big pitches in our AMO was how family oriented they were, that you should do the business for your family.  I found out quickly, that this was absolutely false.  I have seen people struggle with the decision of going to a close family member's funeral or an open.  I heard these same people bragg about how they talked downline into going to a function even though, they had just lost a close relative that week. They were told that the function would make them feel better!  This is not normal business!

I sat with an audience of people, listening to a diamond wife tell us that she was able to travel with her young infant, so that she could breastfeed.  She then told us that she did not expect that we could do this because it would be too hard financially, but we didn't deserve to be able to take our babies along to nurse anyway, because we had not "earned the privilege".   What struck me, more than her awful statement, was that no one in the audience even batted an eye at this!  They were all just staring at the podium with weird smiles on their faces!

I heard another diamond mother tell the audience at a rally that they needed to have a list of at least twentyfive babysitters.  I must say she did tell the audience to not leave their children with just anybody.  Tell me though, how many people out there can realistically find twentyfive people that they would trust to protect their children while they're gone?  Are there twentyfive people you would loan your car to?   This is definately not a family oriented business.  This is a money business pure and simple!

This organization has just found a way to make more money off of so called "tools" and Amway had already figured out how to distribute products without having to pay employees to man the store.  The WWDB makes money, Amway makes money, and the would - be employees pay them!  AIN'T IT GREAT?

I am not a bitter ex-distributor, (okay, maybe I'm a little miffed), but I would like for people to be made aware of the lies that are being perpetuated.  I knew before we got out of the business that there were lies being told and people being hurt, but I didn't know just how far reaching it was.  We were lucky that our debt was taken care of just by getting out.  But,  I know of others in our line of sponsorship, and elsewhere, who are racking up debt and just digging themselves in deeper and deeper, and being assured that they will be rewarded in the near future.  That they are winners, they are successful, they are leaders!

Of course these are adult people, signing their own checks to pay for all of this and no one is holding a gun to their heads.  But, when you totally surround a person, call them day and night, see them at opens, rallies, seminars, functions, house meetings, pick-up, and create an illusion that they are like family to you, and you have them convinced that they need to listen to these tapes when you are not there, they really start to lose track of what reality is.  It is called mind control.  It is all repetition, just different people saying essentially the same things.  I have never had a job where they send you to the same seminar over and over again, but then again, they were paying for it.  In this business, you pay.  And pay and pay and pay.
 

In all seriousness, though, I really very much want to help people avoid making the same mistakes that we have made.  We were warned by people who had walked down this road before us and we did it anyway.   Hopefully, if you're not already in, you will listen to me now.  Maybe, if you are a current distributor, you will see yourself on these pages, and decide you don't care if they label you a "loser".  You will be a loser with a conscience and more money.
 
You will immediately have more time for your family.  They will give you more love and support than your Amway friends ever will.  They will even do it for free!  I didn't realize until just recently how much our children were affected.  Our oldest son told me that he didn't like us when we were doing Amway because we acted "weird".  He also said he likes that we can do things with him now.  We weren't aware of the severe changes in our household at the time.  But, the children were very aware, and  never said a word to us.  Maybe that's because we had become unavailable to them.

There was always downline or upline to deal with, meetings and functions to go to, the stress of paying for the business before anything else, orders to fill, all those "normal" Amriffs, and on and on... The list could go on forever, but I think you get the idea.  I don't care what these people tell you.  Your children may not want to walk on those beaches with you when and if the time comes.  They may not even care to speak to you by the time you are done.

I must say that I really don't blame the recruiters, (oops!), I mean distributors.  They are just doing as they are brainwashed to do.  And who can blame someone for wanting to retire early and be financially secure for the rest of their lives?  Isn't that most people's dream?  I blame WORLD WIDE DREAM BUILDERS for using  people's dreams against them so that they can line their own pockets.