They fleeced him out of thousands of dollars spent on crap he would never use or be able to sell. When he died, a spare bedroom was filled with unopened boxes of their junk that kept arriving with persistent regularity despite our efforts to cancel his account. They didn't stop until we canceled his cards and closed his bank accounts. We were lucky to find a buyer on craigslist, she said it happens a lot and she looks for ads like ours to buy cheap to resell to her own customers.

muntrv

(14,505 posts)

10. Did those boxes also have lots of audio and video tapes of rallies and speeches? That's where most

Reply to procon (Reply #8)

Thu Sep 6, 2018, 12:38 PM

Sep 2018

of the top dogs make their money and not on selling SA 8 and LOC.

Johnny2X2X

(19,084 posts)

9. Mixed feelings

Reply to muntrv (Original post)

Thu Sep 6, 2018, 12:33 PM

Sep 2018

As a Grand Rapidian, I have mixed feelings on Devos. The mark he left on the city is undeniable. He and his family have given $hundreds of millions to charity. But often with strings attached to either push their social views or to help their businesses. Downtown Grand Rapids would not be thriving without the family's investments.

They are Calvinists, an incredibly warped and sick faction of Christianity who have taken from the bible one principle idea, that rich people are rich because they are virtuous and so God favors them and poor people are poor because they are sinful. Calvinism in West Michigan can pretend all types of things, but it always goes back to that one pillar for them, that they are rich because they are good and the poor are poor because they are bad.

True story, in the 1980s I had a friend who worked at a pizzeria near to the Devos compound, he delivered a pizza to none other than Dick Devos himself one time in the middle of Winter. The total was something like $19.67, Devos handed him a $20 bill and then made him go out to his car to get the change. Zero tip.

The Devos and VanAndels (Co founders of Amway) have their name on just about everything in downtown GR. Really public about their giving. Big contrast to Fred Meijer, the billionaire founder of Meijer Supermarkets, while his name is on somethings, most of the time when he gave he kept it quiet, and by most reports he gave more than anyone. Meijer was such a humble man, his favorite thing to do was to walk into his stores around the state at talk to customers and staff, no one was too unimportant for him to honestly take the time to get to know. He and his wife also stayed in their modest home for 50 years even after he became a billionaire, not a dump, maybe a half million dollar house now, but they could have afforded 20 times the place, the reason? His wife grew award winning roses and never wanted to leave or risk transplanting her garden.

Really two polar opposites when it comes to charity.

And Amway was a Pyramid Scheme through and through. They knew it was from the start, but realized if they paid the lawyers enough they could keep growing it just the same.

irisblue

(33,011 posts)

16. Amway tried ripping off Canada by failing to pay taxes.

Reply to Johnny2X2X (Reply #9)

Thu Sep 6, 2018, 01:32 PM

Sep 2018

Source>>https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Amway/AUS/canada.htm
Amway: The Untold Story
The Canadian Fraud Case

Here are some of the details on the Canadian fraud case. This information is taken, with permission, from "Organizational Deviance in the Direct Selling Industry," By Carol Juth, Ph.D. Dr. Juth was a sociologist and an expert in corporate criminology. There are a number of magazine articles that contain much of the same information, but I decided to use Dr. Juth's material because it's more complete and concise, and it contains excerpts from the court documents in the case. For those who would like to confirm this information for themselves, though, the articles would probably be easier to find, so here's a partial list:

Amway Cracks - And Pays, Maclean's 11/21/83.....snip....
Amway Fined $25 Million In Canadian Fraud, Christianity Today 12/16/83
Amway, Canada Reach Settlement In Customs Dispute, Wall St. Journal 9/25/89

A small point , they did make a very good degreaser for oily& greasy spills on clothes

TlalocW

(15,388 posts)

11. My sister and brother-in-law did Amway for a while

Reply to muntrv (Original post)

Thu Sep 6, 2018, 12:49 PM

Sep 2018

They're pretty smart people, but sometimes those are the best for running a con on. They signed me up underneath them while I was in high school because I was a great salesman - worked and excelled at telemarketing, sold the most magazine subscriptions to fund prom, etc. but I didn't like doing it so their beginner/info box just sat under my bed. You can make money at these things, but you have to hustle your ass off and not mind roping friends and family into it, which I didn't like. They gave up within a year.

TlalocW

jmowreader

(50,561 posts)

15. You make money in Amway by manufacturing tapes to sell to your organization

Reply to TlalocW (Reply #11)

Thu Sep 6, 2018, 01:23 PM

Sep 2018

Former high-level Amway distributor Eric Scheibeler, who had one of the biggest Amway organizations there was before he got out, wrote the Amway expose Merchants of Deception. (It's available free online; just type "merchants of deception" into your favorite search engine and it'll pop right up.

He discusses a top-level, or "diamond" (the Amway leadership levels are named after gemstones; as far as I know there is Ruby, Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond and Crown Ambassador. Scheibeler was an Emerald.) distributor couple he calls Zack and Molly Walters. They are millionaires, and they got there by running a factory that makes motivational tapes for Amway distributors, conducting Amway seminars, contracting with a travel agency to give him commissions on all the business he forced to use that agency...Scheibeler was able to get hold of some of the Walters' financial documents and made a stunning discovery: even though he had lost everything in Amway, Mr. Scheibeler made more money from Amway than the Walters had.

I only knew one person who made money in Amway, and he pissed off his upline royally by doing it. He figured out Amway actually only has one product that's worth buying - their water filter system. So instead of doing the whole Amway "show the plan" thing, he got a plumbing license and set up a business selling, installing and servicing the Amway water filter system. He did it for five years.