business & economy

"Amway" takes its name from "American Way" and is both a business and a social / political movement headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Its supporters will champion it as a triumph of American capitalism but as a force in the Michigan Republican Party it has sometimes become a negative campaign issue that the Democrats have successfully exploited.

Amway is on one level a network of businesses that sell soap and other home products door-to-door. If you beat enough doors and are a convincing enough salesperson you can make some money that way --- but locked apartment buildings and condos, gated communities and other physical conditions like some of those we have in Panama can make an attempt to sell door-to-door pretty frustrating.

The real money in Amway is the cut you get when you recruit another person into the sales network. In this sense it's a sales pyramid, legal in most jurisdictions but illegal in some. If you have a lot of people working under you in the organization, you get a little cut from all their dues and efforts, while if you are at the bottom you just get your commission on what you sell.

One problem comes when an area gets saturated with Amway vendors. It becomes ever more unrealistic to expect that anybody will make much money by hooking up with Amway, and a pitch emphasizing wealth and opportunity becomes ever more deceptive under such circumstances.

In Michigan, people generally get lured to Amway pitches by some other pretext and it's increasingly viewed as an unfriendly act, as an appeal to pit a person against family, friends and total strangers by conning them with promises of riches to accept a deal in which there is most probably no such bonanza.

And how does one keep a sales force that has accepted such a bargain motivated? Through a secondary business of motivational speakers and motivational recordings, and by the creation of an alternative social life --- using indoctrination techniques common to military bootcamps, law schools, fervent religious groups, North Korean brainwashers and many others. It's basically a matter of getting people into an inward-looking group, creating a sense of belonging, and endlessly repeating certain key ideas. In Amway's case, those ideas include notions that people without much money are "losers" and that those who can't make a lot of money with Amway are somehow personally deficient. When a person's social life comes to revolve around a group that practices indoctrination, a psychological need to belong makes it much easier to embrace its ideology without questioning it.

Thus one of the founders of Amway was soundly thrashed by his Democratic opponents in a 2006 statewide Michigan race. Thus one of Michigan's less impressive Democratic governors got himself re-elected in a 1980s mudslinging fest by allusions to the "Amway Moonies" working for his GOP adversary. (It was a low blow, even if both the Amway organization and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church are de facto aligned with the Republican Party and they both use indoctrination techniques --- the two groups are distinct and their conflation was unfair if effective.)

In any case, there are plenty of Americans who take offense at Amway laying claim to the "American Way," at being characterized as "losers" and at the social scene that recruitment into Amway represents.

So is it different in Latin America?

Well, at least this region is not so saturated with people who were disappointed when they thought they could make money with Amway, nor with a segment of society that's deeply antagonistic toward the Grand Rapids - based business / political organization.


Editor's note: So what does the author know about indoctrination? He's been exposed to it as a teenager in a radical commune and years later as a law student, read a fair amount about it from various perspectives and shared experiences with others who have gone through similar situations and recognize them for what they are.