by Sarah Gerard
I approach the French doors. The pool is bordered by stocky palms and, beyond them, the twelfth fairway. There is nothing like a yard.
“Can children play on the golf course?” I ask.
“No, it’s private,” she says. “And unless you don’t love your children, you don’t let them play on the golf course because they’ll be golf ball magnets.”
My husband chuckles.
“And the golf course is private,” she says again. “You have to join the club. If a golfer sees a child out there running around, they will call the golf ranger to chase them because they interfere with the game of play.
“Do you play?” she asks my husband.
“No, but family does.”
“We pay for golf privileges and we don’t like people on the golf course. We like our fairways nice and even.”
I wonder where the children play. The front yard is tiny. There’s barely any grass.
“So the kids play out front,” she continues. “And you know what? They do. When a child goes outside, he brings other kids out. We’re very strict about our speed limit here.”
“I noticed the speed bumps,” I say.
“There are no speed bumps,” she says, and I feel embarrassed. “If you came through Bardmoor, next door, there are bumps, but there are no bumps in Bayou Club. A lot of people have low-profile cars. We control our speed through our rover, who shoots radar. The fines are strict.”
“Is there a neighborhood watch?” asks my husband.
“We have two security guards: one that roves the community 24/7 and one that stays at the gate,” she says. “It’s not a hundred percent safe because if somebody wanted to come through Bardmoor, hop that fence in the middle of the night, and intrude on your house, nothing’s going to stop them. That gate out front is not going to stop them.”
“It’s hardly even a gate,” I say.
“Your car won’t get through it,” she says. “They might steal your jewelry, but they’re not stealing any big items.”
“It has the illusion of security,” says my husband.
If it’s not your family who brings you in, it’s probably a friend. For my dad, it was a manager at one of the car dealerships for which he handled advertising. The man’s business comprised almost half of my dad’s income. Over time, they’d developed a friendship. You’d think my dad would be immune to Amway, given his familiarity with advertising’s insidious ways. But how does the saying go? A good salesman can sell you your own grandmother.
My parents and I were solidly middle-class when we collided with Amway. We owned our home. We lived in a safe neighborhood where I could play outside without supervision and walk home alone after the sun went down. We always kept an excess of food in the house. I got new shoes whenever I outgrew my old pair. I received new toys when my old ones broke and new books when I finished reading the ones I had. I went to gymnastics practice four times a week, singing lessons once a week, camp over the summer, and back-to-school shopping in the fall. We didn’t need Amway.
But that didn’t matter. In Amway, there’s no such thing as contentment.
If you’re happy with what you have, you haven’t dreamed, says Amway. Your life could be faster, shinier, brighter, more spacious—don’t settle for less. Join Amway.
You could drive a Jaguar instead of your crappy Oldsmobile. You could build a custom home—don’t settle for that two-bit shotgun you have. If you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished so far in your life, don’t be. Think bigger. Do better. If you don’t believe you can—trust Amway. Amway believes in you.
Nothing was wrong with our life before Amway—we didn’t join it to fill a void. We were happy, until we were told we could be happier.
Amway: The True Story of the Company That Transformed the Lives of Millions reads like an extended advertisement. Its author, Wilbur Cross, became acquainted with Amway cofounders Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel when they commissioned him to write the first “official” history of the Amway Corporation,10 Commitment to Excellence, published in 1986. In Amway, Cross repeatedly references the work of Shad Helmstetter, PhD,* a “motivational expert” specializing in “programming” yourself to change negative self-talk into positive self-talk.11 Negativity is expressly verboten in the world of Amway, as it breeds doubt—distributors are advised to get rid of any negative people in their downline as soon as possible if they can’t train them to be positive.*12
Helmstetter credits the practice of “dreambuilding” as a central reason why Amway is so successful.13 Dreambuilding is more than wishful thinking, Cross explains. It’s more than seeing what people with more money have and wishing you had it. Dreambuilding is “the perfection of excellence”—“It is a way to control what you think, to enhance what you believe, and to solidify your attitude” (emphasis his own). Most importantly, it’s a procedure, “a skill that has to be learned, practiced, and put into action.”14
Put into action—that’s where Amway comes in. It gives its distributors dreambuilding guidelines and opportunities, chances to “practice the art . . . on a daily basis.”15
We slipped Amway motivational tapes into our car’s tape deck, and listened, and repeated. We bought tickets to Amway functions for fifty dollars a pop and booked hotel rooms nearby to attend them. We sampled the products and demonstrated our commitment by filling our house with boxes upon boxes upon boxes of Amway goods.
We made lists. We framed pictures. We drew diagrams. We hosted seminars in our home where we lectured our downline to “activate their dreams.” We constantly reminded ourselves that our dreams were possible. We only interacted with others who affirmed this.
We took photographs of one another inside our dreams: Here I am, a skinny nine-year-old posing proudly next to a kidney-shaped pool. Here’s my mother in a pair of khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt descending a marble staircase. And my father, two thumbs up, lying on a king-sized canopy bed. We visualized, yes—but then we went one step further and made visual. We stepped inside our dreams, literally.
Dreambuilding is Amway’s profit engine. Tour the house for motivation—but then how do you buy the house now that you want it? Buy tickets to the Amway-hosted functions. Buy training tapes and manuals sold by upper-level Amway distributors. Build The Business. Prospect others. Buy Glister and Satinique.
Building dreams was like building a house: it wouldn’t work with wishes alone. Wishes were ephemeral; we needed something concrete. In order for our dreams to feel real, we had to construct them from tangible things. The Plan and The Business were our brick and our mortar.
We step into the spacious kitchen. It has a wrap-around granite countertop, stainless steel appliances, beige tile and smoke-colored grout. I do a spin to peer into the breakfast nook, decorated with gauzy floral curtains and a chandelier.
“Most people think the kitchen needs updating,”16 says the Realtor.
“I like it,” says my husband, placing his hand on the small of my back.
“You’ll want to rip out the kitchen, replace the flooring, put your own touches on the home,” she says, giving me a wink. “Make it your home.”
She takes a folder from the counter and opens it before us. Inside is a floor plan of the house, a map of the community, an elevation certificate, and a packet listing features of the house, with accompanying photographs.
“Not every Realtor does this for their listings.” She points to a spot on the map. “Bayou Club is divided into three communities. Here is where this house is located within the community—the Estates. And here is Sago Point, and here is Copperleaf.”
“What’s the difference?” asks my husband.
“There are four hundred single-family homes in Bayou Club,” she says. “No condos, no townhomes—all single-family. Ninety of those homes are in Sago Point. They’re not tract homes—they’re different versions of the same home, and smaller: two thousand to three thousand square feet. Because of the size of the homes and the maintenance, they’ve attracted a lot of
second homeowners and empty nesters. Somebody looking for something more children-friendly might move over to Copperleaf, where the homes are a little bit larger and the lots are a little bit larger. You may have three-car garages versus two-car garages. And then you can upgrade to the Estates section, where they’re all custom-built.”
“You could spend your entire life moving around the same neighborhood,” I say.
“You could,” she says. “Full circle. Bayou Club is very desirable. People want to live here. They may be living elsewhere and want to upgrade, and now they can afford to live in the Bayou Club after being in practice a couple of years. My husband is a physician, and I know you don’t start out in the Bayou Club.”
“What was this area before it was the Bayou Club?” my husband asks.
“It was very marshy. They rearranged the golf course because part of Bardmoor was in here, so they restructured it,” she says, referring to the adjacent gated community. “Bayou Club is divided into two cities: Pinellas Park and Seminole. When you first drive into the community, while you’re technically still in Pinellas Park, you wouldn’t know it. Pinellas Park is low-income—we call this section an oasis in the middle of Pinellas Park.”
We follow her up the stairs. There are two large bedrooms separated by a bathroom and a linen closet—the children’s rooms. I step into the one on my left, which is smaller than I expected. It has wood floors and a closet with sliding mirror doors. Out the window, the neighboring house is less than ten feet away, and the space between is filled with broad-leafed palm trees. I hear the faint twang of the radio on the pool deck, playing “Sweet Home Alabama.”
I turn around and step into the bathroom. I touch the faucet on the sink and lift the valve to open the water.
“Do you need something?” she says, turning away from my husband to address me.
“No,” I say, shutting the water off. “Just testing it out.”
In his memoir Simply Rich, Amway cofounder Rich DeVos* tells the story of Amway’s origins. The country was in the last gasps of the Great Depression. Rich was fourteen.17 He was walking two miles through the snow to his high school18 each day, in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan: wool collar popped high, galoshes squishing, wind in his face. Occasionally he would take the streetcar or city bus—but allowing time for the city bus meant having to rise long before the sun came up. “I needed more efficient transportation, and already being an enterprising type, I had an idea,”19 he writes.
Enter Jay Van Andel, Amway’s other cofounder. Jay had a 1929 Model A, which Rich had noticed both driving down his street and also parked outside his high school. “I thought a ride in this car would surely beat the bus, a streetcar, or walking,”20 says Rich. The rest is as saccharine as you would expect: good American boys working hard to make their dreams come true—an adventure full of family values and sturdy bootstraps with which one can pull himself up. It begins with the heartwarming story of their first joint business venture, running a pilot school,21 then segues into a comedy-of-errors trip on a sailboat22—a typical masculine coming-of-age experience rooted in good old-fashioned American values like cooperation, perseverance, and leadership.
Rich and Jay go into business together selling Nutrilite vitamins, an early multilevel marketing scheme for which Jay’s second cousin and his parents are already distributors.23 When Nutrilite goes kaput in 1948 after an FDA crackdown on their “excessive claims” regarding the products’ nutritional values (about which Rich only says, “Until then, there had been no official government position on what type of claims could be made about dietary supplements”24), he and Jay strike out on their own—the American way. They can do it! We know they can!
At the heart of Amway is the love of “free enterprise”—an equal-opportunity system in which determination alone is the path to achievement. If you have a dream, Amway says, and you try hard enough to achieve that dream and let nothing stand in your way, then success is guaranteed.25 That is the promise of what Rich DeVos calls “Compassionate Capitalism”26—helping people help themselves.
Rich and Jay set up shop in Rich’s basement selling Liquid Organic Cleaner, or L.O.C., Amway’s first original product.27 With their trust in each other and the support of their loving wives, they’re able to weather all bumps on their ride to the top, including the first federal investigation of Amway, by the Federal Trade Commission in 1975.28 In a chapter of his memoir titled “The Critics Weigh In” (in Part Two, called “Selling America”), Rich says of the suit, “[We] considered the suit another government misunderstanding of business principles and an attack on free enterprise.”29
Anything that challenges Amway—particularly the government—challenges free enterprise, and thus freedom itself.30
Of the Amway distributors who testified in the case, Rich says, “I have nothing against someone who tries Amway and concludes the business is not for them. But I wish they would take responsibility for their own actions instead of trying to blame the business.”31 Likewise naysayers and disgruntled former Amway distributors simply do not understand how business works and are at fault for their own failures because they lack faith in their ability to succeed, and thus the necessary determination.32
If you need proof of Amway’s principles, just look at all the people who’ve benefited from Amway, Rich tells us: millions worldwide.33
But don’t take it from him; take it from distributors themselves.
In a YouTube video uploaded in 2011,34 two Amway distributors talk to each other before the start of an Amway function.* Bass blasts through the dim roar of the packed stadium, which is decked in American flag colors. Spotlights rove over the audience.
“We here, man,” says a young black man in a blue T-shirt. “See all the IBOs. It’s good to be with people in your company, to feel the love. A lot of people back home be wondering how it is and how big of an organization it is. You see: just imagine the potential of having all these people in one group, man, even if you get ten dollars off a person”—he points to a random person in the audience—“all these people. There’s a whole lot of money floating around in here somewhere.”
“This is not a scam,” says the person behind the camera, pointing it now at the empty stage. “Everybody think it’s a scam. Come on, man. If these many people got scammed out? I don’t think so.”
“Besides,” says Rich of the birth of Amway, “we knew what we were really selling was an opportunity for people to succeed on their own and help others do the same through a unique marketing system. All it took was the willingness to work hard to achieve a dream.”35
That’s all it takes? Sign me up.
Eagle Pointe Drive, Clearwater, FL 33762
5 bed, 4.5 bath, 4,466 sq. ft.
$1,150,000
We’ve gone Diamond, we tell the Realtor. We’re buying a house in Feather Sound. We’re starting a family.
This one is just beyond the gate when we enter the neighborhood. It’s desert-colored with a terra-cotta paving stone roundabout drive and another gate that retracts when we enter the code. There are two palms planted on either side of the porch, two more on either side of the yard, and another in the grassy area encircled by the roundabout. A row of perfectly rectangular hedges lines the front of the house beneath the picture windows.
There are five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a game room, a study, a fitness center, a spiral staircase and elevator, a three-car garage, vaulted ceilings, and a three-tier waterfall pool.
The Realtor is standing beneath the porch with a younger woman, waiting to greet us. They’re both dressed in red. They smile broadly as they step onto the drive.
“This is Renata, my assistant,”36 says the Realtor, motioning for Renata to extend her hand. My husband takes it first.
“Nice car,” says Renata. We’ve driven here in a Porsche.
The Realtor compliments my husband’s name: she knows two others who share it. “It’s not a common name,” she says.
“No, it’s not,” he a
grees. “It’s a family name.”
Tuscan-style columns flank the entryway. Inside, the walls are painted with tacky murals of Venetian street scenes. The elevator at the edge of the living area is cylindrical and see-through. An enormous aquarium occupies the wall adjacent to the fireplace.
“You’ll see as you go through, they went to Italy on vacation,” the Realtor says. “When they came back, they tried to incorporate as many things from Italy as they possibly could.”
“I love Italy,” says Renata.
We follow them toward the master bedroom, passing the dining room.
“That is a very expensive chandelier,” says the Realtor, pointing to the one above the dining room table. “I believe it’s Murano. Twenty-five thousand dollars.” My husband studies it.
A sliding glass door leads from the master bedroom out to the pool and a lakefront view with a dock. I open the door nearest me inside the room.
“Now, don’t freak out—that’s just your shoe closet,” says the Realtor, touching my arm.
“I was going to ask you where I should store my wardrobe,” I say.
She smiles maternally. “That one’s just for shoes.”
Renata tells us about the best local attractions, recommending particular farm-to-table restaurants and yoga studios as my husband and I make slow, opposing circles around the room. We meet in front of the master bathroom. The shower is wide enough for three people with three showerheads, a knee-high tawny-colored tile wall, and the rest of the walls completed with glass. The whirlpool bathtub could easily accommodate three.
“We could have fun in here,” says my husband. I elbow him in the ribs.
We follow the Realtor back to the fitness center, a long room lined with rubber flooring, eight machines, and a large, flat-screen TV mounted to the wall.