Amway Sales Dip
In 1983, Amway had its first-ever dip in sales volume, according to Charles Paul Conn in Promises to Keep. In 1982, corporate revenues were $1.4 billion. In 1983 they dropped to $1.1 billion, and remained there through 1984. Conn attributes this to general market conditions. In my opinion, 'general market conditions' would have to include the publication of a damaging book; a highly respected news program's airing of distributor dissatisfaction; and a $25 million fine for criminal fraud.
Another book about Amway was published in 1985, written by a professor at Castleton State College in Castleton, VT. Titled Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise, this book outlined author Stephen Butterfield's two-year stint as an Amway distributor. It also pointed out the cultlike aspects of the Amway business as he saw them, and the inconsistencies between Amway's rules, the burgeoning motivational tools business, and the way business was actually conducted by distributors.
Also in 1985, the book Believe! which DeVos wrote with Charles Paul Conn was reissued in a special Tenth Anniversary edition. In this book, DeVos speaks compellingly about the need for ethical practices in business. No mention is made of the Canadian fraud case. According to Colin Grant, Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B. in an article titled, Giving Ethics the Business, Journal of Business Ethics 7 (1988) 489-495:
For a corporation to compromise ethical principles is by no means unique, or even surprising. But when the president of a corporation which has been subject to one of the largest criminal penalties in history reissues a book insisting on the indispensibility of ethical integrity in business, without acknowledging that crime, this confirms the worst barbs of cynics about the antithetical nature of business and ethics. For not only does such profession ring hollow in the light of the unacknowledged violation of these very principles in practice, but that failure of acknowledgement inevitably appears to confirm the suspicion that ethical profession is being used as window dressing in the interests of power and profit. The function of business ethics then is to divert attention from the real lack of concern with ethics in the single-minded pursuit of profit. This is the real challenge of the Amway case.
That Canadian civil suit was finally settled in 1989. The Wall Street Journal of September 25, 1989, reported that on September 15, Amway paid Canada $45 million (Canadian) "for duties and penalties owed as a result of customs evasion in the 1970s". According to the article, the Canadian government agreed to accept the settlement rather than pursue a civil suit which could drag on for years. The terms of the agreement prohibit Amway from commenting on the suit.
