Amway In the News – Again
November 26, 2007 | By Monika Mundell | 6 Comments »
I think if one MLM company gets the top medal for being featured in negative press, then it would have to be Amway. There is hardly a month that goes by (well, maybe less) where we don’t hear of some sort of court case in any MLM target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://gobala.linktrackr.com/buildingonabudget-mlmrkeywords">MLM.
But clearly, Amway seems to top this one off.
Their recent headlines involve a possible closure of the British subsidiary of Amway. The company is accused of having focused more on pushing their books, tapes, motivational products and more onto their somewhat 12,000 independent agents than focusing on the sales of the products to customers.
Naturally this accusation is rather heavy and could potentially shut down their British organization which would have heavy repercussions not only for the company itself, but more so for all the existing sales agents.
The shit is about to hit the fan now that the Government is conducting their own investigation. At present there is an active three months moratorium on recruiting distributors in the UK and they have banned all sales of tapes, etc not produced by Amway.
This is looking interesting and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it either.
To read more about this latest Amway episode, you can tune to the Times Online.
Monika
Tags: amway, amway in the news, mlm
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This case has been well covered for months on my website and at the Amway corporate blogs. What’s bizarre about the specific accusations in the Times article is that Amway doesn’t sell books, tapes and motivational products! Those are sold by independent companies, Amway makes no money out of it. The UK authorities actually launched investigations against some of those companies as well, but the cases were dropped.
What I think is being missed is that in 1997 the law regarding “Pyramid selling” in the UK was changed, such that it is illegal to even suggest someone will get “any benefit” from recruiting others into the program. This clearly covers virtually *all* MLMs! Most jurisdictions say your not allowed to *receive payment* for recruiting, which is quite a different matter and clearly targeting pyramid scams.
Amway has addressed this issue by doing away with all membership fees, so the law no longer applies to them. Nevertheless I’d suggest every other UK MLM target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://gobala.linktrackr.com/attractionmarketing-mlmrkeywords">MLM should be looking over their shoulders!
ibofightback: thanks for your great comment. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future of British MLM target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://gobala.linktrackr.com/attractionmarketing-mlmrkeywords">MLM if this affects others too.
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