Quixtar BLOG Discussion

I'm so glad I stumbled onto this website.

I've been in Quixtar/Amway for 16 years ... along with the rest of my family (Dad, Mom, brother, sister). We were recruited under false pretenses by my mother's cousin ... who was sponsored by HER brother ... so there's a *family* connection in the upline.

NO ONE in my family has made money in this business. I was serious about it for about five years (age 20-25), until the journalist in me finally overcame the brainwashing and I saw this business for what it really is. Oh, and being GAY gave me quite a unique perspective on all the "pro-family" propaganda they force down our throats.

When I was still going to "major functions" with my family in other cities, in order to keep my sanity I used to slip away during the seminars an hour or so at a time (easy thing to do in a stadium or convention hall setting, where everyone is constantly getting up and stretching their legs) ... slip out of the convention hall, and visit the local gay bars!

Anyway, my real concern is my parents. My father, an engineer, is quickly reaching retirement age (he's now 63). I understand that he has NO retirement savings whatsoever (NO penion, NO 401K ... NOTHING) ... because for the past 16 years (the most profitable earning years of his career), he's been funnelling all their discretionary income into the "system" ... because, as he's been saying for the past 16 years, "Amway is MY retirement". Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, my parents NEVER reached ANY pin level. Not for lack of trying, either. 16 years worth of opens ... monthly rallies, major functions ... house meetings ... driving for HOURS 3-4-5 times a week to "show the plan" ... yadda yadda yadda. Buying EVERY tape and book their upline recommended.

It's not the MONEY that Amway has cost them that concerns me the most (although it's considerable ... probably close to $50,000, all told, once you factor in the premium they've been paying for overpriced merchandise). It's the lost TIME, and FOCUS that Amway has cost them. My parents are smart, hardworking individuals. Dad is a nuclear engineer (he's designed nuclear power plants, bridges, and commercial buildings ... and of course, their house). Mom is a homemaker who doesn't give herself the credit for the WHIZ at bookkeeping that she really is, as well as a gifted seamstress, furniture refinisher, and crafter.

If my parents had NEVER seen Amway in the first place ... back when they were in their 40s ... Dad probably would have continued to focus on the career he's loved (but Amway has taught him to *hate*, because it's a "J-O-B"), and most likey by now he would have transitioned into a prosperous consulting business ... or even become a partner in his own firm. Mom probably would have opened her own consignment store, selling antiques and her own creations. They wouldn't have alienated their family and friends, who are now hesitant to have contact with them out of fear of being "prospected".

Anyway, you all get the idea. In addition to the stress Amway has placed on their lives and their marriage, other life events have intervened, including them moving my dad's mother in with them. And my baby brother is still in college. They put an addition onto the house to accommodate Grandma ... so they've had to refinance the house, taking out another mortgage (which my mother has told my sister is in excess of $200K).

So ... my worry is not purely financial for my parents (I'm in a financial position to intervene and help them ... even support them ... but they're too proud to ask. I'm still preparing for it, though, and as a son who loves them deeply, it would be my honor). My REAL worry is the STRESS they're under:

-- Stress on my Dad, 63 years old, to pay bills, support his mother and college-aged son, and pay off a $200K mortgage, while many of his friends are already enjoying retirement ... free from work ... living in their long-ago paid-off homes.
-- Stress on my mother, who's beginning to show signs of the strain of being a *caretaker* for 36 years and counting (four kids, her mother, her aunt, and now her mother-in-law).
-- Stress on their MARRIAGE, as their upline feeds on pitting husband against wife, when the couple fails to succeed in "the business".
-- Stress on BOTH of them, for being made to feel like "failures" by their upline for every day they're *not* Diamonds by now.

Any ideas out there how I can help remedy this situation?

Ordinarily, posts by new members cannot start a new thread, but in this case, I think Matt's request for help for his parents warrants an individual thread. So I have moved it.

Hopefully, this will be helpful to his cause.


PW

have you sent them to this site and the www.amquixinfo.com site?
It might help.. It takes about 1 year to mentally quit the biz before you do and about 1 year after it to de-brainwash yourself. These sites help raffirm the decision to quit

It is http://www.amquix.info (not .com)

Scott

Thank you, Paine, for bending the rules and giving me my own thread.

Thanks also to you who responded with advice!

Matt -

Maybe someone wiser than me will post something effective here, but I my experience there is nothing you can do. People that I know in positions similar to your parents are like compulsive gamblers; it seems that the longer that they stay in without results the closer they thing they are to going "Diamond".

Compulsive gamblers throw their lives down the toilet even when pressured by almost everyone and everything around them to stop. In this situation, an entire legion of manipulators and their sycophants are encouraging them to continue by the use of distorted historical anectodes, trite catch-phrases, and biblical mis-quotes. Family and friends often don't stand a chance...

Add to that the fact that your father is most likely now desperate to "make it work", as he probably recognizes on some level that he will be eating a lot of generic mac-and-cheese if he doesn't. This will only serve to make his resolve stronger.

Sorry to paint such a bleak picture, but this probably the reality of the situation.

Can anything be done? Maybe. Speaking as an engineer, I know that we can be duped and manipulated like anyone else. But sometimes, when you push an engineer hard enough, they will respond according to their innate abilities and their training. One thing that I used once years ago with an aquaintence that wouldn't quit pestering me was to tell them that I would sign up with them if they could prove mathmatically that I would be "Diamond" in five years. He spent a month (this was well before the public had access to the Internet) working on paper that would do that. When we met to discuss his paper, I aksed him the simple question: "Why then aren't you even a Direct yet?"

His answers were pretty much the standard fare: my results would be different, he just hadn't wanted it enough, etc.. When I asked him what he meant by "wanted it enough", he responed with something along the lines of "he hadn't put in the effort to go Diamond". I told him that I didn't understand, to which he replied "well, I just haven't done what it takes to go Diamond". I knew that this was close to what I was looking for, so I then asked him "So what are you telling me? That the numbers that you showed me are wrong? Your doing this thing almost every night and all day on weekends. Your probably putting in fourty hours on this. This isn't what you told me just minutes ago. Why doesn't your empirical data match your projections?"

That kind of caught him off-guard, to hear it put that way. He stared blankly for a moment, and muttered a quiet "I don't know". I added that I failed to understand how anyone could think that they would by looking at the SA-4400. I excused myself at that point, my goal simply being to get him to stop attempting to solicit me. It appeared that it had been a success.

About two months later, this guy asksed me to lunch. I prepared myself for the worst. Imagine my suprise when told me "Mike, I want to thank you. No-one, for as long as I was in, never really aksed my to the kind of questions that you did ("Sure they did, just not in those words"). I have spent weeks trying to match my observations with what I have been told. It's more likely that I will be run over by a bus tomorrow than go Diamond. I can't keep feeding people this when almost all of them are going to fail."

That was the beginning of the end for him. I hadn't gone in hoping that would happen, but I wans't too disappointed when it did. Who knows, maybe some variation of this would help you communicate with your father.

Best of luck regardless.

Mike

Hi Matt and welcome aboard.

I also have family members caught up in this scheme. I wish I knew the answer of how to get them out. I find researching sites like this one and the others mentioned here to be helpful. If not for getting them out, it is helpful to me in my understanding of why they wont get out. There is actual brainwashing taking place. The changes I saw in my family members is what got me looking into this in the first place.

I have planted seeds of doubt in their heads by relaying some info I have found. Such as the tools income, the low percent of making money etc. Some of my family members have gotten out since, and maybe that had something to do with it. Can't say for sure.

But others are still hard core despite anything I have said. I have learned in this case, the more I say negative about it, the deeper the divide in our relationship becomes. So I have decided to back off and let it play out for awhile.

You having been in yourself may know more of the inner workings than I do. Maybe you could use that knowledge along with all the info here and elsewhere on the web, to help make your case.

Good Luck!

Matt - it's time for a harsh dose of reality, assuming that you are not a TROLL:

If your parents have lost $50,000 in Amway (an optimal number by your admission) and they now have no money/no pension/no savings/no retirement.......at age 63????....then they were doomed to destitution at retirement anyway. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY with an ounce of financial acumen would cruise into retirement with $50,000 set aside for their retirement, given his level of education (engineer).

If this is true - then I hope they're living in a house worth about 3 million dollars, for their sakes.

Deb

Why doesn't your empirical data match your projections?-Peptide

This question, in any form, may be the only way to get through to your parents. Amway/Quixtar is supposed to be a business, and the only way for people who are emotionally connected to Quixtar to see through all the love bombing is to attempt to remove the emotion, and see the business for what it is and what it should and should not be. Business should be about one thing, making money. It should not be about motivation, friends, religion, etc.

My advice, Matt, would be try and ask your parents if they are running their business as a business. Ask to see their profit/loss or Schedule C tax statements. Ask them to set a 3 month, 6 month and one year goal to make X amount of money by those times. See if they can meet those goals. And if not, ask your parents why they think the business isn't going as planned.

Last, I'm sure the AmQuix kingpins are going after your father's ego. He's the man of the house and is supposed to provide for the family and not work for anyone else. And I bet you father, the nuclear technician, isn't used to failure and has refused to let himself believe failure is an option. So you need to tell your father that he's done a great job providing for the family with is job, and he has a legacy of things he built from his engineering job. What does he have from AmQuix? And you also need to tell him quitting is acceptible. How many people think quitting smoking is bad? Or what about Michael Jordan, who was a failure as a baseball player, barely hitting .200 in AA ball. He quit, went back to basketball, where he was the best player in the world, and won three more championships!

Good luck, Matt. We all know it is difficult, but hopefully you can plant that seed of doubt that can begin to grow.

Deb ...

It's not *just* the 50K that they lost out on.

My complaint about Amway is that for the past 16 years ... 16 of my father's potentially most profitable years in his career ... Amway has brainwashed him into souring on his career and focusing all the energies he WOULD have put into cultivating his engineering career *to an even higher level* into building "the business".

My concern is that over the past 16 years, had he never seen Amway, his career would have continued to grow, and he likely would have TRIPLED his income (and savings) by now. It's not about the dollar figure paid for Amway crap ... it's the lost TIME, FOCUS, and potential REAL earnings.

Matt,

Welcome to the board. Your point is well taken, very similar to a friend of mine who had two babies when he joined the business. His kids are now 10-12 years old and this couple still is no closer to diamon, much less even being at a significant pin level. The time and effort spent, and the time spent away from your kids is the real loss. It's also ironic because they sell you the business by saying how much more time you will have to spend with family if you are in the business.

I'm afraid this is going to sound insulting, but smart people do not decide to become crack addicts... or pyramid scheme addicts.

And, based on what I know on the topic of cults and delusions, like any other addiction, belief and hope-addiction can't be cured except by two means : cold turkey (deprogramming) or realizing the problem and trying to break the addiction (deconversion). The latter can ONLY come from a responsible decision from the addict - irresponsibles stay there until they die.

Good luck.

I am going to let others that are more qualified to comment on the second paragraph, but I must point out that the first statement is, at a minimum, incorrect and borders on the absurd.

Intelligence can be qualified and quantified in a number of different ways. No measurement of intelligence, however, can account for the emotional components of decision making and the overall mental health of any given individual. It has been shown repeatedly over the last century that very intelligent people are as easily duped as people of average intelligence, and depending on the approach, actually easier to swindle.

Even the "crack addict" reference isn't accurate. People from all walks of life and with a broad variety of intellects experiment with illicit drugs, and often become addicted. One sees crack addiction less in so-called "intelligent" people mainly because of socio-economic factors. Their powder cocaine addiction rates are actually higher than those of average intelligence.

Pardon me if this is rather...emphatic...but I believe that it is myths such as these that prevent more people from coming forward to complain about the problems in the system, which helps no-one.

Mike

Smart people make dumb decisions every day, Francois. I've known plenty a smart person get addicted to drugs or alcohol, and plenty a smart person who got into AmQuix. With AmQuix, it starts with someone you trust, and a way to make some extra money by working only 10-15 hours a week. You then slowly get indoctrinated into the scam full time, and before you know it, you are hooked.

Yes, you are usually recruited by someone you know and/or trust so the deception sneaks into your life. Then the kingpins use psychology which normally gets you to agree with some of their views such as a business is a good vehicle to make money and that a job is bad, etc. Then they go into how you can control your time and money by going diamond, etc etc. Even the most intelligent people can ghet sucked into the "cause". A better analogy would be someone who goes to look a tornado up close out of curiosity. Then thing you know you're sucked into the vortex.