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May 14, 2004

Quixtar Got It Wrong

In its "response" to the Dateline NBC exposé on Quixtar and its motivational organizations, Quixtar has shown itself to be inaccurate and in many ways, deceptive. It also failed to understand that the Dateline exposé, in a very limited period of time, was trying to show that the problem is with the motivational systems operated by a few kingpin distributors. That Quixtar, and its predecessor Amway, has deliberately ignored what they themselves perceive to be an illegal pyramid scheme, and in fact have dismissed distributors who tried to change things, speaks volumes about the integrity of this multi-billion dollar company. But having billions of dollars does not make a company ethical.

First, and foremost, Quixtar's response is not a response. A response is an answer. By definition, a response waits for the issues to be raised before a contrary opinion is offered. Quixtar did not wait for the issues to be raised. It guessed what the issues might be and responded to its own guesses. It planned and prepared its "response" months before issuing it. Its response attacked the messenger in an attempt to obscure the message.

The most recent update of their website, www.quixtar-response.com, was created before the Dateline program even aired. It was on the Internet within moments of the broadcast and could not have been created in response to the program so quickly if it had been an actual response to the show.

It is simply their corporate spin, created and timed to coincide with the Dateline show. Nothing more.

Glaring Errors

Regarding the inaccuracy in the site's content, there are several glaring errors that should be pointed out and are further evidence that the "response" was not any more than a company line intended solely to protect themselves rather than to present the truth.

First, they claimed that Scott Larsen was interviewed for the program when, in fact, he was not. Their original Quixtar Response web page contained a bio about him on the same page with those of us who had appeared on the program. Quixtar changed this after Scott pointed out their error.

Second, the short biography about us is incorrect. We were not Amway Distributors from 1991-1995, as the bio states. We signed up in June, 1995, were active through the switchover to Quixtar, and remained IBOs until the end of 2001. (Although our appearance on the program may have been something of a surprise to Quixtar, they should have been able to find accurate information about us on their computers since we left the business less than three years ago.)

No Record of Complaints

A third error is Quixtar's claim that we only contacted the company regarding routine issues. As Amway distributors, we contacted them on more than one occasion about rules violations, particularly the employment of politicians and ministers onstage at Amway/Quixtar functions. This directly interfered with our building of the business. "The Right To Differ," a policy statement about which Quixtar felt so strongly that it was included in the Quixtar Response page, is a noble document, but a meaningless one since Quixtar and its predecessor, Amway, have never enforced it. In fact, Amway Customer Relations promised to look into our complaint, but their only response was to send us a copy of "The Right to Differ." We already knew about that policy. We contacted Amway to complain to the corporation about violations of that policy. As far as we were able to determine, Distributor Relations dismissed our complaint as unimportant. To our knowledge, our upline was never contacted to resolve the issue, and Amway never took our complaint seriously.

After our initial complaints to the corporation were ignored, we elected to take any further concerns to our upline directly, rather than wasting our time getting nowhere with the corporation. The reassurances we received from our upline were satisfying enough that we stayed in the business, even though nothing had significantly changed. But the issues always remained, despite the fact that we voiced our concerns about them throughout the five years of our involvement. So while it may be true that Amway/Quixtar cannot locate records of our complaints about the problems we saw, that does not mean that we were silent.

In our final complaint letter to our upline, we wrote, "We would not compromise our convictions for money - thus we will never see the money alluded to in the plan, because the big money is in the tools and speaking. We would not accept the tools money, as long as it is a secret pyramid system. We would rarely be asked to speak. Why? Because we are not Christian and we are not right wing conservative Republicans, and never will be. People who have beliefs such as ours usually leave the business much sooner than we have. We kept hoping that when we made Diamond we could speak our convictions in a way that helps others. We were told that this could happen. However, our own research has told us otherwise. Knowing that we will never be able to speak our convictions, that we must actually hide them, and continue to do so for the rest of our lives in this business, causes us to realize that we cannot do so without a tremendous loss of self-respect. We feel excluded already. Unfortunately, the sense of exclusion has only increased over time. With respect to building the business, it is extraordinarily de-motivating."

If Quixtar executives are unable or unwilling to enforce "The Right To Differ," which they describe as one of the foundations of the business, how many others rules have been deemed unworthy of enforcement, even if they appear on its books? Chaos and the potential for criminal activity are the result when rules are enforced selectively or not at all.

The fact that we did not complain to the corporation about everything that we are addressing now does not mean that we are fabricating our complaints. While we were in the business, we didn't complain about the fact that we were never taught retailing, as we were taught that retailing wasn't important. We were not even aware of the importance of the retail sales rule; we were told to ignore this rule by our upline and when pressed about it, we were told that our personal consumption applied to the rule. We went inactive in 2000 and did not renew after 2001. It is highly unlikely that Quixtar would have responded to any complaints from an inactive IBO, particularly about an issue that had been systematically ignored for at least a decade, if not much longer. We understood how seriously we were deceived by our participation in the system and how significantly it damaged our finances only after we had gone inactive. In addition, we found out that this was occurring to the vast majority of the IBOs after we had gone inactive. Given the history of ignoring these very major problems, what were certain that any complaint of ours would never be taken seriously.