Amway and the Internet
1959. Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel start Amway Corporation, with a single organic cleaning product known today as LOC. Over the years, Amway expands, first into Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and a number of European countries. Today Amway does business on every inhabited continent.
Over the years, Amway has demonstrated a consistent pattern in dealing with "negative" publicity of any sort, including legal challenges. With few exceptions, lawsuits against the company are settled out of court, with the imposition of a gag order as one of the conditions of settlement. Therefore, nobody except the litigants and their attorneys knows the details of the final settlement.
In or about April and May 1995, according to court pleadings, Executive Diamond Randy Haugen sent an ill-advised Amvox message through his large organization, claiming that the Proctor & Gamble company was tied to Satanism. P&G decided to sue a number of the distributors who had passed along that message, including Haugen and Amway itself.
January, 1996. Sidney Schwartz put up his Amway: The Untold Story website. Schwartz, who was not an Amway distributor, had for several years been acting as a section leader on the CompuServe "Working From Home" forum. Many members visited that forum looking for information about businesses they could run from their homes, and many distributors for Amway and other MLMs visited those forums as well. Schwartz began checking out some of the information that distributors provided in the forum, and found discrepancies between distributors' claims and information he turned up in researching the subject. Eventually the Amway research evolved into his web site.
Spring, 1996. Ashley Wilkes, who had been an active Amway distributor for four years, established a web site titled Amway Motivational Organizations: The Nightmare Builders. When Wilkes, who had "invested" significant amounts of money, time and effort into his Amway business, decided to quit, his wife divorced him. His aim in publishing his site was to tell his own story, and to help others who might be going through similar situations.
November, 1996. Two more web sites discussing the Amway business hit the internet. The author of The Other Side of the Plan had been a distributor for over five years. He was disturbed at the money he lost over that period due to heavy "investment" in tapes, books and functions; and also what he perceived as the lies and deceptions that he had been taught to use in recruiting and teaching new distributors. Many of the techniques used in his organization were contrary to Amway's rules for distributor conduct, and he believed that people looking at the business needed that information.
A young computer engineer was briefly involved in the Amway business. Amway: An Insider's Perspective was concerned with the large discrepancy he saw between the promised savings involved in "buying from your own store" and actual Amway prices, and his web site focused initially on that information.
