"You tell me you have a problem, a situation? Frankly, I don't buy it. I'm sorry, for YOU!"
"You think I'm hard? I WANT TO REACH YOU!! SO THAT YOU CAN SEE THERE'S NO OBSTACLE TO YOUR SUCCESS!!!"
"I'm no different from you. Really I'm not! I've got two legs, two arms just like you. And if I can do it, ANYBODY CAN!"
The man who made these quotes was Stan Bonett, a former Air Force officer from Freehold, New Jersey. It was at an Amway seminar held in Charlotte back in February of 1972. Stan was a real up and comer in the Yager organization. A real heavyweight. He was a regular on the speaking circuit, and actually was one of the better speakers they had. In his seminar he devoted much more time to the nuts and bolts of building the business, rather than trying to impose his beliefs upon us. An Emerald in the process of qualifying for Diamond. (At least that was what Dexter told us!)
But something very traumatic happened to Stan. I don't know what, but it was a real bombshell to read this in a magazine article during the summer of 1974:
"Sure it's a fantastic program for those who want to work," says Stan Bonett, a New Jersey distributor, and one of several who is currently "on the outs" with Amway. "We made $50,000 a year but we had to work sixteen hours a day, six and seven days a week to do it. When you're at the top Amway owns you, and if you disagree they'll destroy you." Last year Bonett's disputes with Amway led him to selling his organization to another distributor.
WOW! This really blew the lid off the earnings claims. At previous Amway functions I was told that at Emerald level, you were clearing at least $100,000 a year! Minimum! Let's break this down:
He and his wife were doing the business together, so it is fair to say that each one of them was making $25,000 a year. Two people, right? Let's say they were working the business less than they said they were. How about if they worked it only twelve hours a day, six days a week? That's 72 hours a week times 52 weeks, meaning they did Amway 3744 hours a year. If you divide $25,000 by that number of hours you get a grand total of $6.68 an hour that each of them made in Amway.
Not enough to justify the hype and hoopla at the rallies.
For comparison and perspective, here are a couple of numbers to look at:
Of course, in both wage earner cases the worker ended his relationship with the "J.O.B." at the end of the working day. The days off were his. If the wage earner worked at Chevy Van of Flint, they got paid vacation, dental and vision coverage for them and their children, and strong union
The article also mentioned the dropout rate (about 50% a year) and the fact that less than one distributor in 1000 clears more than $15,000 a year. It said "at the very top some distributors can earn $50,000 a year."
This was a bombshell too. At the rallies Dexter convinced us that successful distributors were the norm rather than the execption! Tony Renard (a Yager Emerald) flat out told us at a rally that there were more people percentagewise in Amway making over $50,000 a year than all other companies, including General Motors!
the web address for this page is http://hunza1.tripod.com/amway/bonett.html